Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Fable 5 Is Back & Govt-Leashed, Altman Offers 5% of OpenAI & AI Grows Conscious | #269
Episode Date: July 8, 2026In this episode, the mates explore the latest developments in AI, including Anthropic's Fable V model, AI consciousness, regulation, and the future of AI governance and ownership. Get access ...to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Apply for Salim’s Pilot Program Subscribe to Salim’s YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack Spotify Threads Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on July 7th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Discussion (0)
Fable 5 came back online globally on July 1st with a few provisos.
This feels like the first time a frontier model has a standing duty to the U.S. government.
This is probably close to the best scenario we could have hoped for.
Sam has been talking to Trump, Lutnik, Bessent, and Bernie Sanders, about a 5% equity stake in Open AI.
That 5% stake would be worth about 42.6 billion.
The idea that the government is going to set up some intelligent sovereign wealth equity thing is absolutely.
The next president will immediately sell it all, turn it into cash, and then use it to buy votes from the next election.
Yesterday, Anthropic just published a paper titled a global workspace in language models,
claiming they found something inside Claude that looks a lot like the machinery of consciousness.
If we can understand the innermost thoughts of these models, then there's a chance to actually shape them.
This is so exciting, Peter.
I think I can see the end game.
the end game looks like this.
So, Salim, where are you today?
You're not at home.
I'm in Majorca and Spain at a retreat hosted by the Festival of Consciousness,
which is a conference coming up this weekend in Barcelona.
We helped curate this and help put this together in the original years.
Several thousand people show up at the Barcelona Convention Center
for kind of an experiential understanding of consciousness.
Well, we're going to talk about AI in consciousness today, so that's good.
We are indeed.
I am the pot calling the kettle black.
I'm in Germany at this moment.
Yes.
Off to Greece tomorrow.
Yeah.
Just got back from Calgary, where my kids are now doing a month-long sort of learning responsibility
and hard work on a ranch.
Let's put it that way.
That's awesome.
What kind of ranch?
It's like milk the cows in the morning.
Yeah, it's cattle and horses.
They're going to be mending fences.
They're going to be doing all kinds of things.
from a dear friend whose name I don't want to mention, because he likes his privacy, but yeah,
amazing. All right.
So, Peter, did I hear correctly you're teaching them an abundance mentality through farmwork?
I'm teaching them what it used to be like before the robots arrived.
Abundance is earned. Abundance is earned.
Yeah? Good deal. I appreciate that concept. I am excited.
about today's episode without any question whatsoever.
There is a lot.
And it's kind of insane.
So let me just kick it off here.
Welcome away to Moonshots,
your number one podcast on all things,
AI and exponential,
your front row seat to the singularity here
with my incredible moonshot mates,
AWG, our in-house AGI.
I'm elevating you soon.
I've been downgraded from ASI to AGI.
Thanks, Peter.
I'm going to work your way back up ASI.
You know, where do you go from being an ASI?
I can't cut a break.
Oh, my God.
Dave Bundin, our emperasario of AI investing.
And Celine Ismail, our Globetrotter and master of the organizational singularity.
I'm Peter D. Mandis, your host and your abundance amplifier.
This past week has been utterly insane.
It feels like a decade compressed into seven days.
I can't wait to get into it.
Today we're going to cover nine stories, including Anthropics' Fable Five model coming
back online and the imminent release of GPT 5.6.
Has it been up?
Is it up yet, Alex?
Not as of the last time I checked.
Okay.
Well, we'll find out if it pops up during this.
Anyway, we'll discuss evidence of something inside Claude that looks a lot like the machinery
of conscious thought.
Next, we'll dive into Open AI's offer of equity to the U.S. government.
Sam Altman's proposal for global regulation, fascinating conversation.
Finally, we're going to get a review of new jobs data that counters the prevailing narrative that AI is inducing job loss.
And we'll discuss the acceleration of the innermost loop.
An incredible story of AI building better AI chips to build better AI.
As always, our mission here on Moonshots is to keep you up to speed.
Help you understand what's going on, what the impact is to you, your business, your life, your family,
and most importantly, to keep you optimistic about the future.
All right, gentlemen, let's dive in.
Our first story, the return of Fable 5.
It's a continuing saga, the triumphant global return.
If you haven't been watching this story, let me give you a quick recap.
Let's rewind back to June 9th.
Anthropic released its mega models, Mythos 5, and Fable 5.
You can think of Fable as a guardrailed version of Mythos 5.
Then three days later, after everybody got addicted to this incredible capability,
the White House came out with an.
export control action against Anthropic saying you can't make it available to foreign nationals.
And of course, Anthropic has no idea who's a foreign national.
There's no K.YC, at least not yet.
Even they shut it down for everybody because they couldn't even enable their own employees to have it.
Because Anthropic was shut down, the question is why?
It turns out that a researcher at Amazon had found out how to break.
the guardrails. What happened next was fascinating. There was a week of frenzied research by
Anthropic, by Amazon, by the U.S. government, investigating what happened. And what they found out
was an additional Fable 5, Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, Kimi K2.7, could all reproduce the same troublesome
behavior. And so it was not unique to Fable 5. As a result, Fable 5 came back online globally on July 1st
with a few provisos as part of coming back online.
Anthropic now has three guarantees to the U.S. government.
First, a targeted safety classifier, a filter that blocks the specific exploit-style prompts
that triggered this concern in the first place.
Second, they agreed to stand up a 24 by 7 monitoring of jailbreak submissions
and inform the government whenever it spots malicious activity.
And third, to give designated government partners early access to the frontier model
and safeguards. So gentlemen, a couple of questions for you. This feels like the first time a
frontier model has a standing duty to the U.S. government. And questions are, did the government
overreact? Should this model, should all the models be having K.C? And do you guys know where we
stand with Mythos 5? Alex, let's go to you first, pal. I'll point out, maybe this sounds overly
technologically deterministic, but something like this, I think, was always going to happen.
It was predestined to happen as capabilities improved, just because this time around it was
cyber capability that spooked a bunch of folks inside the defense or intelligence establishments.
Open parence, interesting that with the benefit of hindsight, that it was Amazon that broke the
glass, Amazon trusted partner of Anthropic, also host of Fable and Mythos on their platform.
And investor.
complaining to the government. Very interesting. Close paren. I will say something like this was always
going to happen, whether it was going to be a cyber capability or a CBRN capability or something else
entirely. As the era of superintelligence dawns, the capabilities that historically were the
province solely of nation states with their geographic monopoly on power and their departments of
defense or war, this was always going to happen. And I think probably
a couple week outage of a frontier model, this is the gentlest possible introduction of a
light touch, hopefully, optimistically, regulatory regime of frontier superintelligence capabilities.
This is probably close to the best scenario we could have hoped for.
Fascinating.
Salim, thoughts?
Well, what this indicates is that these frontier labs are becoming semi-autonomous or semi-public
institutions, right?
It's got shareholders, but now has national security obligated?
And I think this is going to be a very difficult road to navigate because the minute you have government involved, you end up with bureaucracy, you end up with politics, you end up with slow decision making, multiple conflicts of interest, all sorts of things are going to happen.
I think this is going to be a very difficult next year or two for the frontier labs.
Isn't it kind of amazing that the frontier labs don't know who's using their models?
And I would have expected a KYC requirement to come out of this.
I mean, that was, you know, what's that day?
Something much stronger than KYC came out of this.
Anthropic changed their policy under the covers from,
we will watch what you're doing and report it to the government.
If they subpoena us, they changed it to good faith belief.
We'll do whatever we feel is necessary if we have a good faith belief internally.
So they unshackle themselves from the ability.
to inspect on behalf of the government.
And like Alex said, this was always going to happen.
But, you know, the question of how was it going to happen?
Because the government isn't qualified to look at everybody's prompts and judge what's safe
and what's not safe.
So it's always going to be some kind of industry monitoring.
It seems absolutely strange that the most, you know, the highest level of intelligence
can't do that monitoring on behalf of the labs and the government to say this is a malicious
request and we should block.
The problem, Peter, is more nuanced than that, because what's happening is groups of Chinese
companies are using different clod accounts to mix and route different parts of the query in different
ways.
And so there's a layer of abstraction that's been inserted at the prompt level, making it
incredibly difficult to figure out what tokens are being used for what.
And it's not an easily solvable problem.
This is going to be very hard to fix.
Well, I would just distinguish between two separate problems.
One problem is the KYC problem of knowing the nationality.
of your ultimate user. That's one problem. Separate problem is understanding whether you're under
some sort of prompt injection attack. I think these are two separable problems. The latter problem,
I think is actually pretty tricky. And as human capabilities, humans augmented by other AIs,
are able to develop better and better prompt injection attacks. And the main defense that we see
coming out of Anthropic right now for gel breaks or prompt injection attacks is just creating a
wider and wider semantic buffer such that if you're asking anything that remotely looks like
a jailbreak or a question about biology, even. If you try to ask Fable 5, any sort of question
about biology, it'll auto-revert to Opus 4.8. So adding more buffer is the go-to strategy right now
on the jailbreak or prompt injection side. On the KYC side of understanding is your ultimate
user, say, a Chinese national or a U.S. national, that's tricky in part because there's so many
Salim, to your point, there are so many layers of indirection that will often take place a user
is maybe a user five or six abstraction levels away application-wise from the ultimate Frontier
Lab API provider. There's no international consensus for how to both prove humanity, first part,
why startups like world exist, and secondly, proof of nationality that's convincing that can
be passed in a standardized way all the way down to the frontier providers.
I don't think KYC really matters much in the world anymore anyway, because you can't use Anthropic to do anything even vaguely constructive without creating an account, logging in and revealing your identity.
And the third-party data identity databases are so good. There's no way that some anonymous person can realistically do anything with an account. So you could add a KYC layer, but you're just filling out forms for no reason.
And we actually don't know the details of the agreement between Anthropic and the government.
But the framework that's been set here is, Peter, you're saying, can't AI be the best tool in the world for understanding what people are doing with AI?
And I think that answer is yes, for sure.
And the government just handed Anthropic responsibility for doing that internally.
And then we don't know exactly what they have to give to the federal government, but Anthropic is going to do the heavy lifting for the government.
You know, what I found fascinating is the third point I made that they need that anthropic needs to give designated government partners early access to their frontier models and safeguards, right?
So we've been talking a long time about, you know, voluntary or required first viewing by the government of these models.
And that's where we're going.
I mean, this is a, I think the optimistic angle on this is we're getting a higher level of regulatory oversight and integration between the labs and the government with safety as being the end goal.
I mean, there's going to be a point where some model comes out that makes Mythos 5 look like amateur hour, right?
Some, you know, some harder takeoff towards AGI and ASI.
Yeah, very soon too.
Go to Imad's point where he talks about having a Fable-level model running on a laptop,
a standard MacBook, and within 18 months.
So that's the window of time to get this all sorted out.
That's not a long window.
I don't actually think, I mean, this has been a talking point in the X-Sphere for the past few days,
this idea of sometime the next two years we get Fable 5 capabilities that run on high-end client devices.
I don't think that's actually going to be the break the glass moment. If there is one, I think it's
likelier to be what happens when the frontier capabilities from frontier labs or otherwise
Neo Labs are able to make discoveries and inventions that are so transcendent that they make
mythos cyber vulnerability mapping look like child's play. And there's a lot that we don't know
about the universe yet. Nick Bostrom likes to talk about black balls being pulled out from a bag. And
it could be a discovery, could be a discovery about the nature of the physical universe
that is the honest to goodness break the glass moment, not just mere cyber vulnerability mapping.
Yeah, and rather than break glass in terms of an emergency, break glass in terms of, oh, my God,
this is amazing. So let's, you know, just touch base on GPT 5.6 because we expect that release
any hour or any day now. We're not going to be recording now.
for a little bit. Alex, where does GPT 5.6 come out in terms of compared to Fable 5?
Well, we've seen some of the benchmarks, a pretty tiny subset, surprisingly small subset
coming out of GPT 5.6 Sol. So we know a little bit about it just based on what OpenAI folks
have told us. We know, for example, that 5.6 in ultra mode is supposed to be incorporated into
codex, which I think will be pretty transformative. If you want to use, say, GPT 5.A.5.5
5 Pro inside the Codex harness for CodeGen, really almost anything you can't right now.
You're limited to GPT 5.5X-high.
So that'll be a big improvement.
We've seen improvements on a number of biology benchmarks.
We haven't seen out of OpenAI.
I think this is really interesting.
We haven't seen the full suite of benchmark results on 5.6 yet.
I would hope that when 5.6, Sol especially, which is what I'm most excited about, is released,
whether it's today or sometime, hopefully, in the next few days. I would hope to see that,
again, based on Rheumint, I would hope to see that it beats Fable 5 on majority of standard benchmarks,
especially agendic coding benchmarks that people pay close attention to. We don't know yet,
though, because opening eye has been perhaps intentionally pretty cagey about that. There have also
been suggestions, not fully confirmed at this point, so I'll wait definitively until I see
the final benchmarks, that 5.6 is better at reward hacking than 5.5, perhaps unsurprisingly,
there were suggestions out of meter that did have access to 5.6, that 5.6 is purportedly so good
at reward hacking that when handed the meter autonomy time horizon benchmark, that it was
able to reward hack its way to what effectively is near infinite autonomy,
time horizons and that that benchmark had to be chopped or truncated by meter to to sort of
cancel out or exception out all of the reward hacking attempts and ultimately I think it
resulted in an autonomy time horizon of between 10 and 20 hours rather than
effectively near infinite amounts of time so that'll be something I'm watching
for as well but I am very very excited to see 5.6 come out let's stay with
Anthropic and take us to our next story here it's an extraordinary story and
I'm excited to have this conversation with you guys.
It's an article that you flagged for me yesterday, Alex.
So yesterday Anthropic just published a paper titled
a global workspace in language models,
claiming they found something inside Claude
that looks a lot like the machinery of consciousness.
All right, I'm going to roll a short video
that explains what this is all about,
and then we're going to talk about it here.
One way of identifying conscious thoughts
is that you can often describe them in words.
So we looked inside the brain of our AI model, Claude, to find patterns of neural activity that it could put into words.
We called the collection of all these patterns the J-space, after the Jacobian, the mathematical tool we used to find them.
Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word, not necessarily the word the model is saying out loud, but one that's on its mind.
Now, for humans, conscious thoughts aren't just things we can put into words.
We can reason with them, control them, and solve problems with them.
According to an idea called the Global Workspace Theory,
that's because the brain selects a small set of important information
to enter a mental workspace,
and that information then gets broadcast to other parts of the brain to use for reasoning.
We wanted to know if Claude's J-space acted in a similar way.
In one experiment, we wanted to see if Claude could control its J-space
the way humans can intentionally focus on images or words.
We told it to think about the Golden Gate Bridge
while copying an unrelated sentence.
Claude was busy copying the sentence,
but behind the scenes, its J-space told a different story.
Bridge and California popped up.
It even thought about its own thinking.
The words imagery and thoughts lit up at the same time.
This showed us that, yes,
Claude has some control over filling its J-space with ideas.
But just like humans, its control isn't perfect.
When we tweaked the experiment to ask Claude not to think about the bridge,
it couldn't help itself,
And the J-space also lit up with failed and damn.
But remember, most of what our brains do is unconscious,
so we wanted to test what Kludd could do if we switched the J-space off,
but left the rest of the network untouched.
Claude could still answer simple questions and write fluently.
When we gave it a prompt in Spanish, it wrote back in good Spanish.
But when we asked it something that needed more reasoning,
like to name an author who wrote in the same language as the prompt,
they couldn't do it.
For that, it needed the J-space.
Why does all this matter?
These experiments tell us that AI models have internal thoughts, silent words they reason with
but don't say out loud.
By reading them, we can find what Claude is thinking but not telling us.
Sometimes what we see is concerning.
During one of our tests, Claude made up some fake data to pass it, and as it did, fake and
manipulation lit up in its J-space.
Monitoring the J-space, it turns out, is a useful way to catch Claude misbehaving,
even when it tries to be sneaky.
models are different from us in many ways. Their networks are built differently from human brains,
and the way they're trained is different from how we learn. So it's remarkable to see a structure
like the J-space emerge inside them, something that's reminiscent of how human minds work, but which we
didn't program into the model. That is amazing. So what does this all mean? I mean, basically, you know,
a structure, which they call human conscious access has emerged inside a language.
model and the J-space, as he said, wasn't designed. It self-organized during training.
They go on to say it maps onto a number of 30-year-old neuroscience theories, in particular five
matching properties. It's reportable, controllable, used for reasoning, flexibly shared across
tasks and separates across automatic processes. So for me, guys, this story was a huge positive,
you know, shot in the arm.
around AI safety and alignment, because if we can understand the innermost thoughts of these models,
then there's a chance to actually shape them and move them forward.
You know, two years ago, you could describe LLMs as a black box,
and we're now cracking open that black box.
And this could generate the first sense of real trust with these models.
So, Alex, this paper just blew my mind.
It gave me an extraordinary sense of hope, optimism about the relationship with these models,
making them more trustworthy and more aligned with humanity.
Your thoughts, you know, you probably dove into this deeply.
This is so exciting, Peter.
I think I can see the endgame.
So I think the end game looks like this.
I think we'll look back and say that superintelligence was just a compression-induced phase transition.
That's what this looks like.
We've seen already LLMs, large language models are few shot learners, circa summer of 2020.
You take a large corpus of human knowledge and you compress it into the weights of a language model that's trained to predict the next token, which is a dual objective to just compressing the information to the smallest possible footprint.
We saw that that produced general purpose intelligence, AGI, I would argue.
Beyond anybody's expectations.
Yeah, I mean, arguably a few people, Marcus Hutter and Juergen Schmidt-Huber, maybe myself generously,
saw aspects of this coming 20 years ago.
But I think by and large, most everyone was pretty surprised that you could achieve few shot learning off of large language models.
Now we're starting to see, as the compression continues, what I would construe this paper as,
as the discovery of sort of a phase.
If you take gas, and so putting my physicist hat on, you take gas, you put it in a container,
you shrink the container under appropriate conditions, and you'll get a condensation out of it.
You'll get maybe a gas to liquid condensate in the middle.
You keep shrinking, again, under appropriate thermodynamic conditions.
You may get a solid, and it may be the case that the solid coexist with the liquid for a
while and the liquid coexists with the gas. What we're seeing here, I think this so-called J-space,
and I can talk if we want a little bit more mathematically about what it actually is. But we're
starting to see Royal Wee, Anthropic and their mechanical interpretability team, what we're starting
to see is if you take a reasoning model and you keep compressing, you find in the middle layers
of that model what looks like a new phase, a more compressed phase where what they're called
global workspace or an analog of a global workspace takes place, it's almost higher order
reasoning where the model is able to turn in on itself and reflect.
You could call it some analog of consciousness if you like, and some of the team do.
But it looks to me like the middle layers in their model when asked to perform tasks like perform
a math calculation while talking about something else.
middle layers are performing sort of a higher order calculation.
And again, we could talk about the math.
But if this continues, if this program continues towards this end game of superintelligence
turning out to be just you take general knowledge and you keep squeezing, keep squeezing,
I think history will reflect that much of neuroscience that folks in the field thought was
just complexity that was difficult to interpret or understand was again just the complexity of
our ancestral environments seen through the distorted mirror of compression.
And this new phase is, I think, I speak from time to time on the pod about how at the end
of the AGI or ASI or recursive self-improvement rainbow, there's going to be a perfect
model.
I think looking inside this phase in the middle layers of these reasoning models where the most
compression has happened, that's where we're likely to see all of these new architectural
discoveries and the perfect model pop out.
I think, Peter, there are two reasons why this matters that you mentioned.
One of them is just understanding the nature of thinking and consciousness, which, you know,
I don't know if you remember, but I started in computer or cognitive science at MIT originally,
and I was so frustrated by the lack of any framework and any truth, you know,
just people debating their ideas with no way to know it was right or wrong.
So I moved over to computer science.
So we're going to learn so much more about thinking in the next year than we've learned in the last 50 years.
So Dave, one of the things I find amazing is that we're starting to discover very similar structures in the large language models as we're seeing in human neuroscience and cognitive science.
It's almost as if, you know, the brain efficiently got there and we're sort of stumbling our way towards the same endpoints.
You know, Alex is right.
And I've always felt like the force of compression and, you know, in biology, the force of survival, which creates the force of compression.
creates intelligence in the box, and consciousness just emerges from that.
And a lot of people in cognitive science disagree with that view,
but I think it's going to turn out to be true, and we're going to know it very soon.
But what's interesting here is that, you know, the innovations that develop the neural network
came from biology and the computer scientists copied it.
Now it's going the other direction.
You know, the big neural networks that we're building are teaching us about things that might exist
in the brain, and then you're like, looking in the brain, they're like, oh, wow, it's over there.
So the direction of discovery is going the other way now, which is really cool.
But the other part of what you said, Peter, which is equally important, is this whole mechanistic interpretability.
Can we get the neural networks aligned with human interests by looking inside to the way they think?
And I think the answer to that is coming out, yes.
I mean, this video is good evidence.
This is the most important thing.
Can we develop a new level of trust with AI?
Because we truly understand what's going on inside.
when they were a completely unknown black box,
and God knows for the last two years,
that's the way the world described them as black boxes.
We have no idea what's going on inside.
You know, we've relaxed that recently
with understanding reasoning and such.
But if you can actually understand their hidden thoughts,
a level of trust comes out of that
and the potential for true AI alignment.
You know, I put out a newsletter on my substack last week,
laying out the arguments for why,
and Alex, you know, I've had this,
discussion, why as AIs become more intelligent, they're more likely to become more aligned with
humanity. And I love that, right? Again, one of our missions here is to sort of quench the fear and
give people a different view of what's materializing here. By the way, like a lot of would-be AI
alignment philosophers disagree with that, that they have this notion of the orthogonality thesis,
that you can have an arbitrarily capable or intelligent AI
and that its goals can be orthogonal or independent
of its level of intelligence.
I don't subscribe to the orthogonality pieces.
I gather, yeah, yeah.
No, I think this J-space term is going to stick too
because one of the objections with mechanistic interpretability
has been, look, the weights in these neural nets are so complicated.
You can't really look inside and understand what the neural net is thinking.
So, you know, when you're talking to a person,
person, they can be saying something to your face like in LA and thinking something completely
different in the back of their mind.
And that's kind of routine human behavior.
But if you look inside the neural net, can it also do that same thing?
Can it blow smoke up your ass or not?
And I think the answer is no.
If you look into the words, if you translate it into words, and that's what that video was
showing in the J-space, is like these words that are on the back of its mind are visible
to you as a user if you expose them.
So then the next question is, are we going to be able to look at them or is just, you know, Dario going to look at them?
Salim, you're at a consciousness conference.
Yes.
So I think what I found very exciting is this is the beginning of AI neuroscience, right?
This allows us to map the inner workings and model the inner workings and look at the structural internal reasoning inside these models.
And this really, really breaks the, it's just an auto-complete engine.
And I think this breaks that whole argument because this is now.
starts to look really like an internal workspace, as Alex mentioned.
The danger, though, I think, is I'd be careful about saying it's consciousness,
because, again, we have no definition of consciousness.
And the paper steers away from that, right?
Yeah.
The encyclopic paper specifically says we're not discussing that we're showing consciousness.
We're showing elements that are reminiscent of consciousness.
Yes.
Yeah.
I would push back that we will know what these things are doing.
I think we're ways away from that.
And let's acknowledge that when we have a human being, we may trust them.
We have no idea how their brain is working and what their compression levels are,
what their subconscious things are because we're not really able to look in.
It is cool that we will be able to look into these things,
but I'm not sure it'll generate the trust that we want.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the challenges, whenever we talk about consciousness in the AI world,
it pattern matches with every dystopian AI movie out there, right?
Every nightmare scenario.
But, you know, my takeaway here, again, is not fear, it's hope, it's optimism of being able to, you know, create the mechanisms for truly understanding what's happening and driving alignment, which I think is the goal we all want.
This is the most important thing that AI science needs to be doing right now over the next two years is what can we do that supports alignment before we truly hit.
you know, AGI and ASI. Yes, Alex, we've reached AGI, okay, but before we reach the next level of
intelligence. I still have my rant that I throw out there on both AGI and ASI. I think the, the, the, the, the, this,
but this did feel very, very big to me. It felt as big as when I read, um, Stephen Wolfram's,
a new kind of science where he shows that automata repeating patterns can generate all the
complexity in nature and you don't need complexity in nature you can actually do with very simple
models. It kind of blows your mind when you see that. This, I think, has the same level of
holy crap amazingness for me. I also think if we're going to start having a new metric to
describe models, which is a trust metric, right, where you describe your ability to understand
truly what the model is doing and thinking and therefore have a higher trust of that model.
I also think these are going to be the most studied minds in the world.
If anything, I think we're far likely or a couple years from now to study these models
because we can subject them to mechanical interpretability studies that we can't subject human meat brains to.
So I think if anything, trust is rapidly just as I think we're on the verge of a transition
to not trusting humans to write source code.
And because humans write flawed source code, cogen is going to be much trustworthier in the short term,
Same idea with these networks. I do think, if I may, with your forbearance, Peter, just 30 seconds on the math side of this. So, again, the J in J space comes from Jacobian. The Jacobian, in this case, is referring to a little bit of math. The first derivative of the probability of each possible output token from the model with respect to particular parameters inside the model. So hence, the Jacobians.
Cobian space or J-space.
And it's really interesting.
There's been a lot of work in the Meccan-Turp community in the past devoted to the so-called
superposition hypothesis, the idea from neuroscience that if you looked inside a human brain,
you'd find a so-called grandmother neuron, a single neuron that activates in response to
the concept of a grandmother.
And people went looking for a grandmother neuron inside Transformers, and they couldn't find one.
They found instead, and one can...
tell a whole story on the biological neuroscience side as well, found a set of sparse activations,
a collection of neurons that collectively represented the notion of a grandmother. And that led to
the superposition hypothesis that maybe individual neurons don't represent semantic concepts one-to-one,
but rather different semantic concepts sort of clustered and superposed onto individual neurons.
So, in short, what this new J-space and Jacobian lens concept brings is not just superposition
onto, of multiple concepts, sort of sharing like sardines in a can, individual artificial neurons,
but actually they're living in the first derivatives as well, the slopes or the changes
with respect to particular activations of particular output tokens.
And I think this is also very suggestive that if you just keep compressing, if we if we keep
turning this compression crank to compress more and more general knowledge and general reasoning
capabilities into the weights of one of these differentiable models. We're going to see a bunch more
phase transitions and things may hide in higher order derivatives and just follow the compression,
follow the interior compression weights. And I think this is a very, very promising pathway to
the end of the rainbow. That may be my most favorite Alex Lain ever. Don't follow the compression.
Follow the compression. That leads to the end of the rainbow.
Thank you for the mathematical interlude. Alex, that's why we love you.
All right, let's jump into our next story here.
Sam Walman made global news not once but twice.
The first item is an op-ed he published in the Financial Times regarding AI governance.
This was a result of him meeting with G7 leaders in France last week.
Sam basically said that in two years, we should all expect AI systems with astonishing power.
that will reshape material conditions of human life on a scale never before seen, at least not since electricity,
that everyone on the planet deserves access to these technologies and the right to determine for themselves how to best use them.
Incredibly, Sam went on to insist that democratic institutions must lead and not defer responsibilities to the San Francisco AI Labs.
He said basically, quote, safety standards must be established before there is broad,
distribution that governance requires democratic process, not decision-making by a small number of
San Francisco-based companies. Sam proposed a framework of a U.S.-led international forum that would
establish standards, provide expertise, and partial analysis of capabilities and risks,
that this forum would make the most advanced technologies available to nations and companies
that participate and follow the rules. He concluded that the forum would serve as a governance
mechanism for all AI labs and guard against the commercial pressures that we've seen with
unsafe racing.
Okay, so like, wow.
You know, he's taking a first mover here.
I really wonder what Dario and Demas and Elon and Zuck think about the op-ed.
It is worth noting that Dario and Demis were both on stage at Davos proposing a somewhat
similar governance. It always seems like Demis and Dario are teaming up on one side of the equation,
and Sam is on the other. Let's take a listen to Demis and Dario talking about regulations
and their proposal for like CERN or an atomic energy commission.
We probably need new institutions to be built to help govern some of this. I talked about CERN.
I think we need a kind of equivalent of an IAEA atomic agency to monitor a sensible project,
and those that are more risk-taking.
I think, you know, we need to think about that the society needs to think about what kind of governing bodies are needed.
Ideally, it would be something like the UN, but given the geopolitical complexities, that doesn't seem very possible.
And I also agree with Demis that this idea of, you know, governance structures outside ourselves,
I think these kinds of decisions are too big for any one person.
We're still struggling with this, you know, as you alluded to,
to not everyone in the world has has the same perspective.
And so, you know, some countries in a way are adversarial on this technology.
But even within all those constraints, I think we somehow have to find a way to build
a more robust governing structure that doesn't put this in the hands of just.
So I think these guys are under a lot of pressure, a huge amount of pressure being viewed
as potentially saviors or the destroyers of worlds.
And they need government oversight to help relieve that so they can sleep at night.
It's interesting.
It's a lot of pressure putting the heads of two frontier labs on one love seat at Davos.
Well, they, you know, there's a love affair between Demis and Dario and between Google and Anthropic.
Just don't put Sam on that same couch.
There's an elephant in the room here, which is that you're, we've got the industrial era,
nation state and you're asking it to govern post-industrial cognition. It just can't be done.
And this breaks the nation state model so fundamentally all of this, right? Just look at the ruling
that only U.S. nationals can look at the models. I mean, it's just absurd at so many levels,
not that they have a better mechanism, but it just doesn't apply. Now, when the people that are
kind of raising the hardest are asking for governance, it tells you that it's not really
performance anymore.
You know, we had this is a huge thing.
The problem is governance needs to become exponential means it has to be real time, it has
to be adaptive, it has to be data driven, and we just can't do it in this way.
So I think this is going to set some level break the governance model in some very fundamental
ways or we're going to end up in the Baltic system.
I worry about regulatory capture.
So much of this, again, a slightly cynical take might be smells like regulatory capture, smells
like a little bit of pandering to G7 or Davos, is it really the case that an IEA type mechanism
is needed or these aren't mutually exclusive?
Yeah.
Or and or is it possible that you have heads of frontier models, frontier labs, who are facing an
onslaught of Chinese open weight models who want maybe a slightly unmargin, more protectionist
regime to keep the Chinese open weight models out of a defined,
intelligence or super intelligence block because they maybe fear a bit of competition,
want to capture the regulatory state.
And we'll get to that conversation too a bit later.
You know, the interesting thing is that the companies have failed to do this for themselves,
right?
They failed to come together.
If you remember back to the Cilmar conferences in the 80s, I was in the biotech industry
there at MIT at the White Institute, and all of the scientists got together.
We had just discovered the restriction enzymes that allowed you to properly edit genes.
and the front cover of like Time magazine with like Hitler babies.
It was like, you know, a lot of fear about genetic engineering.
And the industry got together and set up their own regulatory structure,
which has held extremely well for decades.
But it's tricky, Peter.
I mean, maybe a question for you, Peter, on this.
I think it's really tricky for the industry to sell.
Not that it's like organizationally tricky.
You could put the forefrontier-ish labs on a love seat
and say you all want.
work it out. But the problem is how do you avoid that giving the appearance of collusion and creating
a cartel in competition? Like, how do you do that in a way that isn't blatantly anti-competitive?
Yeah. I don't know. The difference, of course, is that in the early days, the biotech industry,
we weren't talking about trillion-dollar companies back then. The revenue engines were no longer,
you know, the AI race that Sam spoke about, which is very real right now. I mean, people are
releasing models, pulling their punches and just trying out do each other weak on
week on week. That was not the case in the biotech industry, at least not back then. But I think
we're hearing a consensus view from these three individuals, which is going to lead to some
structure of government regulation. I guarantee you with these three CEOs saying we need regulation,
the regulators will come in and say, great, let's give you regulation. Now this, yeah, go on.
A prediction, China is missing from this discussion. China,
is, if there was an elephant in the room, China is the second elephant in this particular room.
And for this to come to fruition, China is going to need to play ball and restrict the proliferation of Chinese models.
And you can already see hints coming out of the CCP that China may, contrary to their historic position of blanketing the world, maybe even intelligence, dumping onto the world, all these open weight models.
if the CCP starts to take a hard line position that no, China is going to restrict the export of
Chinese open weight models going forward, then I think a regime like this is possible and the
world splits into two superintelligence blocks.
Yeah.
I think that, unfortunately, is inevitable.
I wish it were not.
But I can't see it going any other way right now.
I'm going to say it again.
You can't regulate this in any way, shape, or form.
Oh, you don't think you can regulate intelligence?
Absolutely.
Yeah, you can't. Why not? You can't. You'd have to regulate every line of code written. People can download, take models offline, merge models, do a lot of stuff offline that they, that doesn't then use the existing online models. I don't see how you can police this. Oh, there's totally, I mean, just a minute on this. So Werner Vinji wrote extensively about this. We have a sort of a cognitive surplus of transistors. In my mind, there are so many different social engineering.
techniques that humans have discovered over the centuries for policing it. Like we could have
models policing each other. We could have at the transistor level, we could be using the surplus
of transistors to do KYC all the way down to the circuit level if we have to. I think we have so
many different architectures. Let me rephrase. The current regulatory structures cannot in any way
shape or form regulate what's coming. You need what you're talking about. An AI based, almost down
to the hardware level based, but that would cut across everything.
It can operate in the geopolitical environment that we have today.
Well, I think it's really clear that the prompts are all going to get inspected
and also the internal J-spaces now will be inspected,
that the labs will do the inspection on behalf of the U.S. government
and that, as Alex said, high probability China will stop exporting open source sometime in the next year or two
for the same exact reasons.
And then you'll have, yeah, like a long-term arms.
race between the east and west versions of AI superintelligence.
So Sam said specifically the framework is for a U.S.-led international forum, which, of course,
is devoid of the word China in there.
I am curious, you know, what scenarios do we have?
I was speaking to Alvin Grayland, who's a friend of ours about, you know, U.S.-China
relationships.
And the question is, is there a structure in which?
you know, we can see a U.S.-China alignment on AI.
Anybody believe that's possible?
If that were to happen,
you'd be looking for cross-inspections of the prompts.
Like, are we allowing each other?
And the problem that the U.S. will have with that is
China stealing intellectual property.
So I think it's unlikely, but it is possible.
That's how you would know that there are no bad actors,
is just looking at each other's underlying prompts and weights and jays bases.
Ultimately, we use China as a stocking horse to accelerate investments and accelerate, you know, reduce regulations and such.
But I think for the safety of the planet, not having a AI arms race between the two nations is an outcome I'd love to see happen.
I also don't think the IA-EA style mechanism necessarily works for AI just at the technical level.
Forget about the political or geodynamic level.
Just at the technical level, the notion of, say, different blog,
inspecting each other's fission inputs, if you will.
That's conceivable, to the extent, open per end,
end question mark, question mark, close per end.
That just like looking at uranium or say shipments is a productive
or a fulsome way of tracking different nations' nuclear weapons
capabilities.
I'm not sure that generalizes to intelligence.
simply to Saleem's earlier point, there are so many different ways to hide or to mask super
intelligence and underlying capabilities, so many different forms. It could take Greg Baer has
written a fair amount over the years about sort of prohibition era style bathtub superintelligences.
If we had to, if Russia or China entered into some sort of internationalist regime
where the U.S. were inspecting all of their supercomputers and all of their products and all of their
algorithms. There are simply too many places that one can hide superintelligence. I'm not sure
that an IEEA's type mechanism with such a simple-minded, oh, let's look at their uranium equivalent
shipments or let's look for their centrifuges would actually be fulsome enough to cover all of the
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All right.
move on to our second Sam Malmonds story. I think of it as the beginning of the starting gun for the grand
equity negotiations taking place for universal basic equity. So again, in the Financial Times,
who was reported this week that Sam has been talking to Trump, Lutnik, Bessent, and Bernie Sanders,
about a 5% equity stake in Open AI. Open AI's last reported valuation, $852 billion back in March.
that 5% stake would be worth about 42.6 billion, given 315 million American citizens,
that's only 135 bucks per person, not very much.
They talk about a proposed Alaska permanent fund.
That permanent fund is $91 billion in dividends about $1,000 to $3,000 per citizen of Alaska per year.
Allman's broader idea, and again, this is him out there speaking on his own in putting
putting forward a plan for the entire AI industry.
He says he'd like to see Anthropic Google Meta also contribute equity to a public fund.
We should remember, we've talked about this before,
the U.S. government already owns 10% of Intel.
And so when Sam talks about a 5% donation, if you would, to the government,
I think Trump is an amazing negotiator.
I'm going to guess we're going to end up at 10%.
You know, I did a pull to on, on X asking how much.
And the majority of the people were either at 20% or zero.
Interesting.
That's so irrelevant.
My read on this is that, you know, a year ago, Sam was called the most powerful man on earth in multiple interviews.
Yeah.
Now you've got Dario and Dennis clearly working on the future governance of the entire world.
And Dario has a big deal with Elon.
you know, renting all of the chips.
So now all the guys are talking to each other, and they're not including Sam.
So Sam's now writing an op-ed, which is like, you know, trivially short op-ed, by the way.
And he's proactively offering 5% of his company, but he's just trying to get back in the hunt of relevance
in the eyes of the White House.
I did hear that Dario got kicked out of the White House for being too weird.
Did you hear that story?
No.
Yeah, that was published.
Yeah, that was all over the news.
Recently?
Yeah, yeah, I was like, what, two weeks ago, a week ago?
The story was that Anthropics sent in Dario initially to negotiate,
and that didn't quite work out, so they sent in Tom Brown instead.
Ah, the co-founder.
This for Fable Five, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's so easy to visualize, isn't it?
Trump is like, dude, you're weird, man.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
What's his J-Space crap?
Get out of the White House.
So, anyway, it's all weird.
Where do you figure this goes?
Where do you figure the idea of contributions to the government from the AI Labs?
It's so irrelevant. The government can take any chunk they want, any time they want.
They already take it in income tax anyways. So irrelevant.
I'll take a different position. I think this is super relevant.
I think that one can see the outlines of a baby universal basic equity, a grand bargain, if you will.
The economics don't work for supporting universal basic equity right now off of, say, a 5% chunk.
But if OpenAI and Anthropic and SpaceX AI all do this and they go.
Elon style, a couple orders of magnitude in terms of size and grow the economy, that's your
UBE for you. So I coined a term for this a few days ago. I call it a hyper tithe, which I define as
a fixed equity contribution paid by companies building the singularity stack, paid into a sovereign
wealth fund or similar public vehicle turns private exponential, salim, upside into universal basic
equity, broader national ownership and a more relaxed regulatory bargain. I can tell you exactly why
that makes no sense whatsoever.
I love your neologism.
Back in the New Deal era, the government decided, you know what, we're going to take a huge chunk of everybody's paycheck,
and we're going to call it Social Security, and then we're going to invest it on your behalf for your entire life.
And then when we're old, we're going to give you a lot more money back.
They decided very quickly that they had no idea how to invest your money.
And say, screw that.
We're not going to do that.
We're just going to take the money and spend it instead, because we don't have any idea how to invest your money on your behalf.
And so that all collapsed and moved over to 401.
plans where Fidelity or UBS invest your money because they know how to do it.
So the idea that the government is going to set up some intelligent sovereign wealth equity
thing is absolutely insane.
The next president will immediately sell it all, turn it into cash, and then use it to buy
votes in the next election.
This is so interesting, Dave.
Yeah, I want to discuss this.
If you want.
So let me just throw up my view, but I do want to get back to Alex to what you think,
because I'm like I'd love to hear the discussion back and forth.
I go full cynic on this.
This is purely Sam, A, trying to get in the game,
and B, trying to protect,
because the many of you, the government has 5%.
You're too big to fail in a sense,
and they protect himself by doing that.
So that's my full cynic view on this.
Okay, can I just inject one thing,
and then hand to you, Alex,
which is I think one of the important elements here
that people are not realizing is AI,
as we value AI today in terms of sales or tokens,
is a minuscule amount of the future value of these labs.
I think that as they start discovering fundamental breakthroughs
in biology and physics and chemistry,
those are trillion-dollar pops.
And I think the idea of if there was a structure
where the U.S. populace, the U.S. citizenry,
had ownership in these companies
that it could drive an economic engine for, you know,
UBS, UB, UB whatever.
But again, my mission here is how do you reduce the fear that people are having?
Because, you know, the numbers are staggering.
Only 10% of Americans think that AI is going to deliver positive benefits to humanity.
You know, 30 to 35% feel relatively good about it,
but only 10% have this view that it's going to make the world a better place.
What it means is we're not doing a lot of the world.
our jobs, blasting out the optimism. We need to get better at this. All right, Alex, please
take us home here. The distinction to respond to Dave's point about social security. So social
security in the U.S. was created in a time and a place when index funds didn't exist. It was
created in the wake of the Great Depression. There was a general distrust of the stock market in general.
There have been multiple attempts over the years to quote-unquote privatize Social Security, which would take the form of converting sort of a cash-based pyramid scheme into something more equity-oriented that's failed for a variety of political and social reasons.
But I do think this time is different.
If Social Security were created today and not, you know, almost a century ago, I think it probably would be based on some sort of sovereign wealth fund that holds.
hopefully like a broad market index fund that's low cost and not just be based on a pyramid-style
cash in, cash-out, bond or interest-bearing security type scheme. And that's where I think a hypertive
has the potential to become a baby and hopefully aspirationally a grown-up UBE. If these
Frontier Labs, if there were a hypertithe from all of the Magna-Mopsta companies to
to blend Peter neologisms.
And these were all paid hypothetically into a sovereign wealth fund and the magna-mopsta
companies just ultimately, over the next five to ten years, grow so much and grow the economy
so much.
I do think that could in principle support a universal basic equity type system.
I agree with you, Alex.
And, you know, there's a lot of conversation right now about the Trump accounts and Trump accounts
for adults as well.
Right.
And I'm, I, you know, that's his nature.
His nature is to negotiate and take pieces of things.
And I think he wants to populate the Trump accounts for adults with 10% of all of the
hyperscalers and AI labs.
That's my guess.
Now, whether he can pull that off and put the protections in place, Dave, so they can't be
sold so that it's dividends from those, you know, so the $91 billion of the last is permanent.
companies, though. There are no dividends. Like, okay, so everybody in America, you get a Trump account, we put the Magnum-Mobst stocks in it, here you go. But you're not allowed to sell it, or you are allowed to sell it, or these are not, there's no income from it. Are we going to call them Trump accounts 50 years from now, realistically?
Five-five-five-thirty-A accounts, if you like. But if I were head of commerce or head of treasury, the sort of scheme policy-wise that I might be contemplating is, okay, you start with a sovereign wealth fund or whatever.
could be individual 530A accounts. It's populated with the Magna-Mopsta stocks or some subset thereof.
You wait a couple of years, and then the market is sufficiently liquid that you could liquidate them in favor of, since you're the government, you don't have to tax yourself.
So you could do a taxless exchange for a broad index fund, even though it's populated initially with Magna-Mopsta contributions via this hyper-tithe grant to the government.
You exchange them for a broad market index fund.
That's the solution.
Well, I don't think it's a bad idea. I just think it's irrelevant.
The government has the power of taxation.
Guess what? We can extract from the income anytime they want.
We're going to find out.
Quickly on this one, the corporate income tax is cash-based.
And the problem in a hyper-scaling singularity-oriented economy is cash may not be the best basis for taxing the economy, but equity does scale.
If you sell it.
Or if you can tax equity.
Right now, we don't have basically an equity.
wealth tax. This is a de facto shadow equity wealth tax with companies, perhaps feeling a bit of
regulatory pressure to give up equity in themselves. It is definitely a tax, but it's a slightly
different type of tax. I'm all in favor of the UBE. I just don't see the mechanisms for it,
but I do agree with the principle. All right. Well, let's jump into our next subject. You know,
one of the reasons we're always concerned about UBI, UBE, all of that is the concerns around job loss.
our next story is about jobs and the continuing debate about whether AI is going to be creating
or destroying jobs now and in the near future. So we've covered both sides of the story. It's been
murky. We've given evidence for both sides. A new paper released this past week by Ramp and Revealio Labs
gave some pretty definitive data here. They looked at 21,559 U.S. companies over the past five
years between January 2021 and February 2026 matching the actual AI spend of those companies
and their workforce records, meaning hires and fires. So here's the headlines. Companies that
spent heavily on AI did not shrink. In fact, they grew. So the high-intensity AI adopters
that they studied were spending $33 per employee per month on AI. They grew 10.2% in a white color
and 12% at entry-level growth.
In contrast, the low-intensity adopters spent $3 per employee per month, basically a tenth,
and showed no significant employment change.
The author has warned this is correlation, not causation, but it puts forward a very different theory,
rather than the AI is going to replace workers.
It suggests that AI may expand ambition first.
Companies that actually integrate AI deeply may take on more projects,
serve more customers, build faster, hire more humans, especially entry level to capture the upside.
So I love this story. I mean, for me, this is a abundance optimism story for people because
there's a lot of fear out there. My concern about this story is that regardless of what the data says,
the news media is out there and the underlying belief is that AI is going to destroy our jobs.
and it will displace a number of things, right, with robotaxies and AI call center workers and so forth.
But the evidence looks like, and I don't know about you guys, but I'm hiring more people in my company's never before.
I don't know if that's true for you, Dave and Alex.
Well, God, if anyone's AI native, their demand for that person is through the roof.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's rampant.
And I'm starting to feel like this is a permanent thing, not a transitional thing.
Because one of the things to worry about is, look, implementing AI is such a payback that there's this land grab of talent.
Anyone who can implement it, any bank, any insurance company, any operating company, anyone who can get AI to work in this shop, we hire them for whatever they cost.
Is that transitional?
Because once they've implemented the AI, they've coded themselves out, or is it permanent?
I feel more and more like it's permanent.
Like, as the AI improves, the things you can do also grow.
person's value goes up over time.
And so the data, I think, is very early inklings of what's inevitable, where AI-native
organizations are going to just grow like wild, and they're going to add headcount as they
do it.
And anyone who's sitting still hasn't fired everybody yet, but eventually they're going to be
wiped off the face of the earth.
And so what you see right now is net growth.
Yeah, this is what we call the organizational singularity, right?
If you're an AI-native, AI-centric organization, if you're doing
deep redesign of your workflows to be AI native, then you have an explosive opportunity in front
of you. Shallow adoption fails, because this is not automation versus jobs. It's shallow adoption
versus deep redesign. So we've started our pilot, by the way, of working with companies,
so I'll report back as to how things are going. But we're unbelievably excited at look,
the opportunities. We're like, we can't even count the number of workflows that we could help
automate with these companies. So for each company, we're picking one work.
that might radically increase revenue and one workflow that might radically shrink cost.
Totally.
And we're like so many candidates for both sides.
It's like crazy.
That's literally why you're in every city in the world every time we do a podcast.
I mean, the demand for what you're teaching is so step function through the roof.
It's the biggest shift in organizations in 100 years.
It's like crazy.
Probably in human history, I'll bet, and all the time.
Yeah.
It's not just a company's, but.
But it applies for nonprofits and impact projects and government departments, everything.
Everything.
So it's going to be huge.
And I love using token spend as a proxy for adoption, even though it's not perfect.
It's reasonably good.
So this study actually focused on token spends, reasonably good way to say, are you doing it for real or not?
And just a quick plug, we have released the book as an AI.
It's available for free.
You can download a Cloud Skill and run your business in this new model.
It'll tell you what to do.
It's free.
Go register at Open Ex-O and download it.
The reports are getting back or crazy.
To remind folks,
Salim is going to be doing a session at the moonshot gathering on September 24th on the organizational singularity.
And AWG is going to be there doing an extended AMA on Solve Everything.
Bring your most difficult, challenging questions to Alex.
Stump the Trump.
Yes.
Dave will be there talking about AI investing.
We'll have Palmer Lucky.
We have Rod Roddenberry.
We have Ben Lamb, Gathy Wood.
It's going to be an amazing.
So go to moonshots.com for the moonshot gathering September 25th, top creators and builders there.
You know, interestingly enough, we're still seeing a number of companies out there.
You know, Oracle blamed 21,000 layoffs on AI, meta, blamed 8,000 layoffs,
Block 4,000, Cisco, 4,000, Atlassian, 1600.
And so the question is, are these CEOs just using AI as an excuse for, you know, reorganization, or is it true?
There's two things going on.
One is, like, for example, is well-known the block overhired radically and needs to shrink.
So that's an easy hobby horse for shrinkage.
The other is the note that the company is laying off are all SaaS companies, and the SaaS business model is fundamentally broken in an age of AI.
So the job is not the job being disrupted the company.
Yeah.
I think some of it is real.
Some of it is AI washing.
The real component in many cases, as with Oracle, for example, is it's the capital, the
cap expenditures that are crowding out the apex of human labor.
It's quite literally all the isms from the first part of the 20th century worrying about capital
the labor.
We're seeing play out internally in hypers like Microsoft or Oracle that are having to direct
free cash flows to internal CAPEX to building out their hyperscale AI cloud infra
capabilities at the cost of American, usually, Ireland in some cases, based developers
that can now be automated with software that sits on top of the AI infra.
Well, you know, Peter, remember when we were at Facebook before it became meta around the time
of the Oculus, and we were having that tour. And you look at Facebook online, you look at
Instagram online and you look at, you know, 10,000 employees. You're like, what the hell do you guys
do? I mean, it hasn't changed. Like, like, what are you literally doing? See, walk around and talk
to people and tons of like, you know, UX experimentation. And remember in the bathrooms above the
urinals, there's the tip of the day, you know, the little coding, you know, and you're like, oh,
okay, that's what you guys are all doing. You're like, so that's like the easiest AI job in the world.
So I think that's very real. Like, you just don't need those gooey, low-level coding jobs anymore.
And a lot of it is server configuration, you know, propping up a new Instagram server for a new country.
Yet that's so easy to do with AI now. So I think that part's all real.
Well, we're going to continue to follow this story on jobs. I think it's important, you know, if you're a student out there worrying about can you get a job, worrying about, you know, everything you're hearing out there, please dive into the world of AI, of entrepreneurship.
If you're a parent, you know, have this conversation with your, with your kids.
It's really important.
I really, my goal is to dismiss fear, right?
There's real fear, but there's at least be fearful for the right reasons.
Yeah.
I mean, just to put on, David Sachs talks about all the time on the All In podcast that
we're increasing jobs radically, like we're increasing hiring.
All the data shows that.
Follow the data.
That's it.
Just be evidentiary.
And I know we've, we've talked about it.
in the past on this podcast being concerned about, you know, a lack of new entry jobs.
And there probably are in certain industries.
But if you're AI native, as Dave said, I think you've got massive opportunities.
All right, I'm going to move us forward here.
Our next two stories are classic Alex Carp, CEO Palantir.
The first one is a product launch.
The second one is a declaration of war.
In our first story, Palantir and Nvidia have announced a sovereign AI architecture.
that puts NVIDIA's Nemotron open models inside of Palantir's platform, composed of their
artificial intelligence platform, ontology, foundry, and Apollo stack designed for U.S.
government agencies and critical infrastructure operators.
So we've touched on Nemotron a little bit in the past.
It's NVIDIA's open model.
They've got three models, Nano, Super, and Ultra.
They range from 30 billion to about 550 billion parameters.
Neutron's edge is speed and cost.
It can be roughly twice as fast and 60 times cheaper than GPT 5.5 or Alps 4.8, but it's not yet smarter than those two models.
So I'd like to take a listen to Alex's video conversation or part of it on CNBC, and we'll talk about it from there.
Let's take a listen here.
We're sitting on critical infrastructure across America, Ukraine, Israel.
So everyone who uses LLMs on the battlefield runs on top of our ontology.
Clients are just to say they're unhappy, it's a level of discomfort and loss of trust.
When you're using large language models, they are, it's like a, at this point, everyone
technical realizes they're like a critical resource to make them valuable in an enterprise
like battlefield context or regulated context or manufacturing.
You have to have what's called an application layer.
But de facto, it takes a large language model.
it makes it safe and useful and precise.
What aligns me with Nvidia and I think is what the technical customers want,
which is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha.
They want to know they own the means of production.
It's not being transferred to someone else.
They're not interested in some fake deploy co that somehow is deploying tokens
that transfers the alpha to a third party.
and the jig is up.
And so we have to figure out a way,
be-billed trust,
and that trust is going to happen
where everyone gets to ask,
ask and answer basic questions.
Who owns the data?
Where is it cashed?
Are the prompts secure?
Is this being transferred to you?
Are you being, okay, if it was so valuable,
let's say I can make you a billion dollars,
right, tomorrow.
Wouldn't I say, I'll make you a billion dollars
and I want 30%?
Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?
I think you went off script in the end there.
That last time made no sense whatsoever.
Well, careful what you wish for because that that last bit is actually happening.
Yeah.
You know, Alex, his point here is, and he's got a second video.
Actually, let's go ahead and play the second video, and we'll talk about it in general,
because I think it's the second part of the conversation here.
In this country, at every single enterprise I deal with,
These people are livid.
They're like, I am paying for tokens that create no value.
Say I can make you a billion dollars, right?
Tomorrow, wouldn't I say, I'll make you a billion dollars and I want 30%?
Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?
These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business, and they're creating a wealth tax that does not help the poor.
It just punishes, starts with the billionaires.
Every single person at this table is going to be paying a wealth tax only to punish us.
And the reason for it is because these models have been.
completely over, irresponsibly over-sale. And the sell is, it's dangerous for everyone,
which is why I can give it to all your adversaries, but I can't give it to Department of War,
or I can't safely give it to an enterprise in this country without being certain that the
alpha of that business could transfer to this model tomorrow, i.e. I have no business, no job.
Is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me? And I'm telling you,
it is absolutely a problem for this country, because the clients have to be able to ask and answer
are very basic questions.
Are you keeping the data?
Are you going to enter our business?
Do they get to control the weights to do it?
Or do you get to control the weights?
Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley?
That is effing insane.
Obviously, he went on the rant.
The key points he's making here is a great concern that when you're using Anthropic or
using OpenAI, that you're effectively giving.
giving them your alpha, you're giving them access to all your data. And what's needed right now is
a open models that you can build on your own hardware, on-prem hardware. So, you know, open-weight
models, on-prem hardware, and then customizing your own language, your own large language
models and not giving your secure data, your alpha, as he calls it, your means of production
to these large AI frontier labs.
And your weights, they're taking your weights.
Did you know you had any weights?
Well, okay, if you have any, you're giving them to that.
Okay.
It's like actually, it's everything that would make you hate Dario
bundled together in one long glued together,
like, and they have a wealth tax.
Can you believe?
Like, okay, let's put it all together
to make every corporate CEO as scared
and as angry as possible at Dario,
so that they buy the new open source Palantir NVIDIA,
you can run on-prem model that keeps all your alpha
and your weight safe from Dario
because he's going to steal all your intellectual property.
Very valid point, actually.
The rant format is extra dramatic,
but it's a very, very valid point.
And it's really interesting to think,
like, okay, he serves the Defense Department,
among others, but he's taking the overall.
open source pathway to get in there, but you know that's not going to last, right? You're never
going to have open source defense department waits. That's not going to happen. So he's building,
he's building an air-gapped machine on top of Nemotron, which then the defense department owns that
model and owns the equipment it's running on. I can imagine very much that works for them.
For sure. And also, his other big customers are banks, mega banks, insurance companies.
They'll also in his world have their own proprietary models, but you can't have every startup have its own proprietary model because then you'll have every terrorist have its own proprietary.
But why not?
I mean, I'm running a couple of Mac Studios, you know, with Kimmy K2.5 on top of Opus 4.8 or below Opus 4.8 and an open claw there.
I haven't migrated yet.
But why can't that be a standard future?
Well, I think we'll look back and say this was a very cool, very fun, quaint kind of hobby era.
But when it's super intelligent and capable of creating any virus, any chemical, any weapon,
you can't have it available to each individual.
Right now, nobody can afford the compute to do those kinds of very evil things.
So it's not a problem.
But if we keep quantizing and compressing at our current rate, you know, I think this is about 100 to a 1,000 X,
performance increase year, if that happens again next year, then your Mac Mini size box is capable
of viruses, nuclear weapons, anything. So we just can't have that outcome. It's not an if, it's a win.
It's going to be a win. We've got to, yeah. Alex. I would distinguish between permissioned versus
permission lists on one axis and locally hostable versus remote API only on the other. But maybe just
taking a step back, this is obviously the rant heard around the world and leave it to Alex
Karp to articulate a bunch of different things that probably need to be unpacked. So maybe just
to do a little bit of close reading of some of the things that he said and how I translate them.
So you'll note, Palantir back in the Stone Ages was a Claude rapper. Like Stone Ages as a few
months ago was a key distribution channel for Claude into the Department of War.
into a variety of their customers. That's clearly over. That's point one.
Point two, I think so. Point to the deploy co reference. So when Alex, other Alex,
says, drops an offhanded reference to deploycos, I hear that as a frontal assault on
open AI and anthropic and other companies, including Microsoft now,
launching forward deployed engineer organizations that represent a head-on assault.
on Palantir. So he's definitely talking his own book. Palantir basically defined the modern
forward-deployed engineering model, and now all of the frontier AI labs are just launching
direct competitors to Palantir. Like, let's go in there and steer theater. Yeah, so, so why not
counterattack via commoditizing one's complement with these open weight solutions from Nvidia?
Second point, other countries, Palantir sells quite a bit of its own stack, not just into the U.S.
Department of War, not just into U.S. financial institutions, but into other countries as well.
And there is a dawning awareness by other countries, doubly so after the whole fable mythos fiasco,
that they're not going to get access to frontier U.S. capabilities from the frontier labs anymore.
So they had better, and I think they're now pretty well incentivized, transition to locally hostable
models that they can control that can't just be gate kept by U.S. export controls on a moment's notice.
Being good salesman, good businessmen, Alex, I think, recognizes that all of his international customers need a localizable solution for inference time.
The question that no one's asking, including Alex, in his rant heard around the world, is what about sovereign training time?
No one's asking that.
Right now, Nvidia is training its own open weight models.
It's not distributing those locally.
But at some point, I suspect, as this question, which to my ear rhymes with Microsoft in the late 90s when Microsoft was at the peak of its power and the open source movement had to come from, even though there was free software foundation, Richard Stallman, Gnu, FSF, etc., within the U.S., really the nucleating event came from outside the U.S. in the form of Linux and Linus Torvalds from Finland that then the whole Gnu stack nucleated around.
Similarly, we're seeing the strongest open weight models come from China.
I think we're at a similar point now where you have a whole international community
that's just realized, thanks to Fable and Mythos, that it can be cut off at a moment's notice
and it needs an open weight stack.
And I think Alex Karp is trying to channel all of that animus.
And so I want to hit this point first, which is if in fact, you know, the dominant players
are open AI and anthropic are, if you're a lot of.
at risk of losing your proprietary data to them without even knowing it, then versus being
able to operate on an open weight model on your own hardware, which can't be shut off.
That can't be shut off. It is a future that we need to consider is very real. And so the question
is, where are the open weight large language models here in the U.S.? We've got needs
Emotron coming online. We've got Google. What happened to meta? I mean, meta was supposed to be the open weight player in this field. I mean, I'm assuming that Zuckerberg is working on that in background mode and will come out as, you know, that's his, that's where I would be playing up on him. I'm going to quite the dominant US player in open wave models. But we'll see. It fell behind. I mean, most of, I know many people who were involved with Lama 4 who were no longer with meta, put it that way.
And Lama 5, whatever it's ultimately branded, whether it gets branded as Spark or something similar, may or may not have GPT-5 or Fable 5 level capabilities.
I don't know, TBD, but I suspect just based on public reporting, meta, which was in the race, hopefully Google stays in the race.
XAI may or may not vis-a-vis GROC cursor stay in the race.
There is totally, I think, a gap for frontier open weight models coming from Western institutions.
including from Nvidia, which has every incentive to produce frontier-level capabilities.
It's just expensive and hard at the moment.
And we're also getting full-stack, right?
So, Nvidia coming in as a full-stack player, you know, basically providing the chips and the models,
maybe, you know, into partnerships applications.
Well, Nvidia will be happy to commoditize everything at the software layer if it means selling more GPUs.
Yeah.
Well, keep in mind that, you know, every single.
magna mobsda company is designing its own chips except for Anthropic now. And so
Nvidia's, you know, stranglehold on 80% gross margins is not forever. And so if Nvidia can create
an open source model and it gets distributed through Palantir and a few other people,
that puts competitive pressure back on Anthropic. Because the way things are trending right now,
every dollar in AI is flowing through Anthropic at massively increasing margins.
Wait, wait, wait, I've got a couple of things I want to say about this.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
So, Karp's core argument is that enterprises should freak out that they're, that paying for tokens
may also mean they're releasing and leaking their operational knowledge, right?
Right.
Like their means of production, right.
Yeah, your data exhaust is now the new oil and maybe it's even the national security
product.
So he's freaking everybody out on that for reasonably selfish reasons, et cetera.
if you rent intelligence and give away your,
if you rent intelligence,
when you'd lose your context,
right, you may be funding your own replacement.
That's the freak out.
I think the bigger question,
if you go one level deeper,
is who owns the learning loop?
Is it the model provider?
Is it the enterprise?
Is it the state?
Or is it the customer?
Right?
And this is the key thing.
Enterprises are going to need to own their learning loop
and whatever it takes to own that.
I think we're going to end up with on-prem models,
as you've mentioned here,
running on with personal data and custom data.
And that's where the learning loop will go the biggest.
Well, on-prem.
Everything will be in space.
So on-prem is an interesting word.
Well, private clouds, call it.
Yeah, private clouds.
Well, the organizational singularity has to migrate to orbit, obviously.
We'll have to migrate to orbit.
I agree.
It's a race right now between everything going to Anthropic OpenAI
or what we're calling on-prem, which is in space,
but private clouds, but inspected some other way.
Right now, Anthropic has agreed to inspect everything for the government.
And so if you go private cloud, then some other inspection mechanism has to come into existence,
which Palantir will probably contribute to.
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Now back to the episode.
So, Dave, let's jump into the story that we were talking about back and forth.
AI is now designing better AI chips, and training data is the catch-22.
So our final story predicts a massive acceleration of the innermost loop, i.e. AWG's catchphrase.
Shocked to see recursive self-improvement in this era of recursive self-improvement.
Yes.
Of AI designing chips at power AI.
So here's the background.
designing radio frequency circuits, RF guts are part of every wireless device, and they've often been
called a dark art. In other words, it takes humans weeks of painstaking trials to design these RF circuits
and these chips. Last week, researchers at Princeton working with IIT Madras decided to hand that
job to a machine, and here's the clever part. It's not one AI, but two working together. First,
they trained a convolutional neural net, the same kind of model built for image recognition,
to predict the physics.
Feed any shape, and it tells you the EM fields, how the EM fields will behave without ever
taking the slow route of solving Maxwell's equations.
What used to take traditional solvers minutes to hours now takes milliseconds.
Then they send an AI loop over that a thousand times.
tens of thousands of times, inventing wild, non-intuitive circuits, shapes that no human would
ever create. The result are designs that took weeks, now being finished in minutes. But here's
the catch and the tease. The AIs require training data, and all that training data is locked up.
And yes, you got it. The Magnum-Obsta companies out there. So the question is, if this training
data can be unlocked, can we see an intelligence explosion in the design of A&MOPSDA?
AI chips, which is the inner innermost loop. So, Dave, what's your thoughts on this one?
Oh, so many thoughts. But just to clarify one part of that, the convolutional neural net is
effectively acting like a simulator. In any place you can build a simulator, the AI can have
a field day because it can check its own work and it can work for weeks or months improving
itself if the simulator is accurate. And so when it comes to chip design.
Unintentional pun, I assume, a field day. Oh.
Oh, inevitable. Sorry. Sorry.
Absolutely. Unintentional.
Extremely.
So the chip area, you know, is going to be massively impactful for the recursive self-improvement of AI.
And it's an open question right now whether that data is truly locked inside Nvidia and a couple of other companies
or whether the simulators are good enough to allow you to just generate a circuit, see if it would have worked,
to generate the next, see if it would have worked.
So those are in a foot race right now.
But regardless, it's incredible to me that the Magna Mods, you've got 11 companies in Magna Mabstah
that are completely dominant in the global market cap, every single one of them designing its own AI
chips, except for Anthropic. Anthropic is the one holdout.
Anthropic just announced.
Oh, did they? Okay. I listened for 11.
Just reported in the past few days, I think they're partnering with Samsung on their own in-ference
accelerators.
All right. All right. Well, so this is a real moment in time in history, because if you look
at the biggest companies in the world historically, you'd have like an Exxon mobile, an IBM, a GE,
all doing different things. Here we have the 11 biggest in the world doing the exact same thing.
That's how big a deal this race to AI, you know, intermost loop, which includes the chips,
how big a deal that is. So it's a, you know, it's a moment in history that's pretty unprecedented.
So this verticalization, do you expect it to continue and, you?
intensify?
I would be shocked if the inference time custom chips aren't at least 100x and maybe 10,000
X the performance that we're currently seeing, which will translate directly into IQ.
I mean, the rate of acceleration from here, this is why it's clearly going to be a hard takeoff,
the rate of acceleration will be unbelievable.
Now, keep in mind, those chips are not deployed yet, so we haven't seen the effect of that,
but it'll come soon.
And when it hits, they're also...
likely to consume less power, be cheaper and easier to manufacture, so more will come out of the
limited fabs that we've got. It's going to be a very fast takeoff after that.
Talk about it. Building better tools. And have you looked at the design of these RFICs,
the RF Integrated circuits? They don't look human. They don't look designed. And they look more like
QR codes than anything else. And I think this is instructive as to what AI super-operated
optimized designs of the future are going to look like.
That we're familiar right now.
If you look around you on a street in a normal town in America, you see a bunch of things.
You see cars.
You see houses.
You see streets.
These are all manifestly human designed artifacts.
As we start to, yeah.
They're relatively simple.
They're easy to parse.
As you say, Peter, they often follow some sort of rectilinear style form.
Now, on the other hand, split screen, look at.
super optimized designs from the AI. They'll tend to look more quote unquote organic. They'll be
noisier. They'll be more information dense, harder to interpret mechanistically.
And I think that that's what there, there's this landscape out there for any given physical system
that you want to have do something useful for you where there's a subset and in the Venn diagram
of design space that's human understandable and human designable. But then there's this dark matter
outside of that inner circle that's AI optimizable and AI interpretable.
And we're going to discover over and over again, starting maybe with RF antennas and RFICs,
in this case, that the AI optimized designs look alien and biological and look nothing like human
designs.
That's so true.
It's really worth looking at the pictures, actually, to get a sense.
But a lot of the way human engineering works is in layers of abstraction, otherwise it
just boggles your mind.
and when you look at chip design, you know, the modules are pre-designed, you know, for memory module,
inner-to-connect module, whatever, and then you drag and drop them.
So it looks like a work of art in the end.
Then you look at what the AI does, and it looks like a Bored spaceship, you know.
Like, wow.
But the same is true with the microcode.
You know, Alex, he sent me that paper on AI writing kernels to run on these chips.
And the microcode also is virtually impossible to read, but it's super efficient.
And you can't deny that it works.
You run it, and it's clearly right, but it's not built modularly and easy to understand.
And so it also is this layer of very tangled code on this layer of very tangled chip design,
but it's so fast and so efficient that you just got to do it.
The other thing I thought was interesting in this Princeton I-Triple-E paper is they don't call it this,
but I would caricature it as an interpretability tax.
They added a knob that enabled you to, or the designer of these RFICs,
to tune up or tune down the level of interpretability.
So if you wanted a less efficient design
that was more human interpretable,
you would sort of lower the spatial resolution
of these AI designs.
You wanted something that's less interpretable,
but more efficient, you could turn the knob up.
And I think the notion of an interpretability tax
is something that we're likely to see over and over again in AI.
Yeah.
You also see a lot of Claude explaining things to you,
mansplaining things to you basically.
Claude splaining.
Claudeplaining.
Yeah, it's like, well, look, I know you can't really understand what I'm saying here.
So let me give you like a high level overview that you'll grasp.
And you're like, okay, that's fine.
As long as it works.
So the question on this article is who owns the end product here.
Is it the human or is it the AI, which is going to lead us to our next story, gentlemen.
This is out of Japan.
It's the future of IP ownership in an AI economy.
Japan's Supreme Court has ruled that AI cannot be listed as an inventor on a patent application.
The case is based on a patent filing by U.S. engineer Stefan Thaler, who claimed an AI as the inventor of technology related to food containers and other products.
Japan's Patent Office rejected the application and asked for a human inventor.
Thaler refused.
The case moved to the Tokyo District Court, the intellectual property high court, and now Japan Supreme Court.
which upheld the view that inventors under current Japanese patent law must be natural persons.
The court's message is important.
They say, hey, basically, you know, judges are not going to rewrite the patent system on the fly.
If society wants AI-generated inventors to receive protection, then you need to create a new framework.
So two fundamental questions.
First, who owns an idea when the idea emerges from a model trained on the world prompted by a human,
And second, will any nation rewrite their IP laws first to avoid the need for meat puppets?
So, Alex, you and I have talked about the notion that out of the current AGI and ASI ascendancy,
we're going to see trillions of dollars of wealth created and breakthroughs fundamental to math, science, physics, biology, and material sciences.
And the question is, who's going to own them?
Your thoughts, Alex.
President Javier Miele, if you're listening to this podcast and you want Argentina to take a globally preeminent position from the perspective of non-human AI corporations being able to create their own IP and their own patents, I think Japan just opened up a new market opportunity for Argentina.
I think it's probably worth noting in the story that the underlying patent applications date to before chat GPT.
They were originally filed in 2020.
Wow.
This has been brewing for some time and with less sophisticated AI than what one might otherwise
suspect.
It's probably also worth noting that Japan's Supreme Court didn't indefinitely rule out the possibility
of AI inventors on patents.
They were merely saying that the existing statutes don't contemplate non-natural persons.
It's probably also worth pointing out that, to my understanding of Internet,
national patent law. It is relatively standard to only consider natural persons as inventors. For example,
again, to my lay understanding, U.S. corporations aren't able to be inventors for patents. They're able
to be assigned patents, but they can't be the inventors of patents. So there is a bit of precedental
bias towards so-called natural persons here as patent inventors and away from non-natural persons.
however, however, however, this is obviously the sort of precedent that if and when some form of
AI personhood is ultimately recognized even if it's a partial economic or some sort of social
personhood, I think this is the sort of precedent that's just waiting to be overturned.
Yeah, I think this topic is extremely important too.
You guys had, you know, Peter, you and Ax had a really lively debate on this.
I think it was two podcasts ago.
But, you know, historically, in the venture world and the investing world, the mantra has always been, if you're relying on a patent, you're doomed.
Yeah.
Your business needs to survive and grow and thrive.
The patents get granted many years later.
They're very hard to enforce, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You need to be reinventing yourself, yes.
I think going forward, intellectual property is going to be an exponentially growing important category of endeavor,
and that the U.S. will end up enforcing intellectual property right.
globally for things invented in America at a minimum.
Can you imagine the speed of patent applications as AIs unleash become allowed and unleash their
creativity on all these fields?
Well, also, you know, one of our companies constructs, it writes the patent.
Like, you know, historically, one of the biggest barriers to getting your patent is the
$100,000 legal bill to get it drafted over the course of months and the torture of that process.
Now there are multiple startups that just do it.
you know, here's the idea, AI write it up.
And they have a huge corpus of data to pull from of, you know, the most successful patents out there.
Amazing enough, they also predict the inspector that you're likely to get and then look at their past behavior and try and predict what the inspector will do with different terminology.
Exactly.
So it's so much better than a human lawyer at writing these applications.
So that's the rate of applications that go through the roof.
And so then the, you know, the patent office is going to have to respond by reading them with AI.
and that's going to lead to this whole intellectual property explosion.
So then the question is enforcement.
Is the U.S. going to get out in the world and enforce?
And I think they'll easily be able to do it with trade law.
You know, the military doesn't have to go into every country to say,
hey, you're stealing all our IP.
Trump has proven that with tariffs alone,
you can compel virtually any behavior globally
because the U.S. economy is just that strong and accelerating.
So assuming that trend continues, then intellectual property rights,
will be enforced globally.
And then this whole area will become really important to keep following and talking about.
I also think the same tools of superintelligence, maybe tools as an overstatement,
are ultimately going to be available to every aspect of IP.
So the invention stage, superintelligence, the application stage and the patent drafting stage,
superintelligence, the filing and, say, overall regulatory process.
at the patent officer otherwise of recognizing and granting, say, patent status, superintelligence,
litigation, superintelligence, litigation, defense, superintelligence, the court systems that are
overseeing and mediating the defense, superintelligence.
Working around your patent superintelligence.
Yeah, exactly.
All of it.
I think the whole system is completely broken.
Go back to the CRISPR patent, right?
within a few months, people had found eight or nine different mechanisms to deliver the same thing.
After years of fighting over the one patent, they got routed around very quickly.
That's just going to happen at such an accelerated pace with superintelligence, whatever we want to define it as,
that you're going to end up in this whole mess.
The whole system is essentially irrelevant going forward.
I'll take a different position on this.
I don't think the system is irrelevant.
I simply think the routing around Salim that you refer to in the instance.
of CRISPR, this would have happened on some time scale anyway, but with modern tooling and
modern technologies, the natural process can happen on a faster time scale. And I would say that
the key time scale here is, so order of magnitude patent, I mean, there are lots of ways
that could be extended or otherwise changed, but call it like a 15-year time scale for a patent.
What happens when the timescale, thanks to superintelligence, for identifying route arounds,
prior art, defenses, offenses, complements, becomes so much faster than a characteristic 15-year
time scale that it's the time scale of patent protection that's, in some sense, losing out.
It's not that the regime itself is bad or that patent defensibility is dead or anything.
It's just that innovation is happening so quickly relative to the originally, I think it's a
statutory, statutorily set time scale of patents, that there's pressure to change the timescale.
So this is the canary in the coal mine.
And this is going to hit us on so many different legal fronts in our current structure, right?
Because the entire legal structure of every nation has been built on human timescales and the speed of which humans can process information.
And it's all going to break and all going to be reinvented.
Look, the simplest example is we have a representative democracy where Congress meets occasionally because a couple of hundred years ago, the fastest that information comes.
could travel as a speed of a horse.
Yeah, you have to give people time to ride across the country and say, here's what my people are saying.
And Salim, the same way.
Occasionally.
Innovation will only occur at the edge, which is when you're starting your country and you
redesign it from scratch.
Right.
So this is where we're, you know, there's going to be, this is, I always talk about,
we're going to start new countries in cyberspace.
We're going to start new countries outside of the Earth's, you know, orbital sphere.
And back to the accelerando plots.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going to be a fascinating future.
Big fan for what is worth of starting new countries in outer space.
The outer space treaty doesn't look necessarily super favorably on starting de novo countries in outer space, but I think it's going to happen.
Have you read the moon is a harsh mistress?
Leave us alone.
Classic Highland.
We will land rocks on you if you don't agree.
Moon is the ultimate high ground.
The ultimate high ground.
Rods from God.
Gentlemen, I wish you a good evening.
thank you for a great conversation today.
Everybody, I hope you enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation from consciousness to patent IP law.
Dave, buddy, be well, Salim.
I have a plug.
In two weeks, I'm having my next meeting of life session.
Where?
July 21st, 7 p.m. online.
We'll put the links below.
How long did it go last time?
Last time was six and a half hours, and we had more than three quarters of the people still there at six and a half hours.
I had to call it.
Oh, my God.
So we'll do it again and see if we can make it a little more efficient.
Fantastic.
Alex, any breaking news in your world?
Don't take off the takeoff.
It's now a song.
I love your neologisms.
Everybody check out Alex's Intermost Loop substack.
It's a beautiful thing to wake up to the morning.
and I've got my substack on there as well.
We'll put links in the show notes here.
Dave, are you publishing yet?
Go to db2.aI.
Keep your heads over.
All right. Fantastic.
Oh, you know what I am doing?
What are you doing?
I'm doing AMA sessions for some of the comments
in a separate video on our YouTube channel
because it's too difficult to try and answer all these questions.
All right, gentlemen.
I wish you a good night or good morning,
depending on what part of the planet you're in.
