Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The AI Duopoly Is Over: Grok 4. 5 , GPT-5 . 6 , and Muse Spark in One Week | #270

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

In this episode the mates discuss Grok 4.5 vs GPT-5.6, Apple Suing OpenAI, and China catching up to Elon. 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 Join Salim’s 10X Shift 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 11th, 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)
Starting point is 00:00:00 July 8th, Elon announces GROC 4.5. July 9th, Open AI releases GPT5.6. We have four American labs now at the optimal frontier. This is a convergence episode. Apple sues Open AI for trade secret theft, accusing them of stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming AI hardware. The two companies, which were partners just, you know, literally a year and a half ago,
Starting point is 00:00:24 are now in an all-out legal war. I think this is Apple trying to slow. slow things down while it catches up. Yeah, it's a pretty aggressive move and you have to be, you know, pretty hurting to do it. For the first time, China, Long March, which manufactures their primary launch vehicle, demonstrated landing of an orbital booster. I think we want propulsive landings to be as competitive as possible. We really don't want it.
Starting point is 00:00:59 Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. This is the number one podcast in AI and exponential technology is your front seat to the singularity. I'm here with my magnificent moonshot mates, the original four. Dave London, Salimus Mayel, Alex Gleas. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host here in my homeland of Greece. Behind this curtain here is the beautiful Aegean. All right. Open it open.
Starting point is 00:01:22 Open the curtains. You can't say that. Come on. I'll get blown out. I'll, uh, yeah, that's probably a dumpster back there. You're in a secure location. Yeah, I mean, absolutely magnificent location. And just like Saleem, Selim, where are you today?
Starting point is 00:01:39 I'm in Barcelona at the Festival of Consciousness. Yes, you're still there, right? Well, hey. You know, I was at a meeting at Allen & Company headquarters in New York once, palatial, ridiculous Allen & company, meeting with Charlie Allen, and we were in this conference room that was covered with Remington original sculptures and Norman Rockwell paintings.
Starting point is 00:01:59 And at one point, he said, hey, do you want a water? And the entire back curtain and wall open up. And there's like a five-star kitchen full of people with these, like, you know, big chef hats cooking back there. He said, Dan, that's not for you. I'll just get you this bottle of water and close it again. So that's what's going on behind your curtain right there. You just don't want to see.
Starting point is 00:02:17 No, no, no, okay. One second. Is the, the Aegean over here. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, honestly, I'm sacrificing a lot to be with you guys right now. But hey. Hello, yes.
Starting point is 00:02:31 Wow. Your sacrifice will be remembered, Peter. You know, you know, you can, you know there's a lot of wealth when all you're seeing is yaks every place. It's insane. Not mine. You can swim out to those. I've seen James Bond do it.
Starting point is 00:02:46 Swam out. Crawl up the anchor chain. So, yeah, yachts are 20th century wealth. I tell you, I can't wait for my space yacht to happen. There we go. There is so much happening this week, guys. Everybody listening, we spun up this bonus episode because, you know, it's just crazy. So I tweeted yesterday, you know, we're obviously in the singularity living through it because robots are performing surgery.
Starting point is 00:03:11 A single SpaceX booster has been reused and reflown 36 times. We released four models in seven days. And Elon casually claims SpaceX is going to be worth more than the entirety of planet Earth. So I'm not exaggerating when I say there's a lot happening this week. Please remember our mission here at Moonshots. Keep you informed. Keep you up to date. keep you optimistic about the future.
Starting point is 00:03:36 So I think this week, Alex, is going to be your test on exactly what's going on in the world because it's kind of like Frontier Model Release Week, if there was such a thing. So we said... For the e-vels? Yeah. Well, you know, it was not too long ago when we're releasing models like, you know, every six months, every three years. Now we've got four models in seven days.
Starting point is 00:04:03 It's kind of insane, isn't it? Turns out the singularity isn't just vibes. Well, it's going to be a continuous model release. I mean, this idea of a single model being released and calling it a release, I don't know. But July 2nd, Fable 5 is re-released. July 8th, Elon announces GROC 4.5. July 9th, opening eye releases GPT 5.6 family, soul, Tara, Luna, and Ultramode. I love that.
Starting point is 00:04:27 That runs four agents in parallel. July 9th, meta show signs of life with the release of Muse Spark. So, Alex, I'll show a couple of charts here, but without going into an hour long on the benchmarks, help us understand what's going on with these four releases. I really want to get, one of the things I'd love Dave and Salim and Alex is to help people understand how these differentiate
Starting point is 00:04:57 and how does it impact them individually when they hear all these releases being made. For me, the zoom out is this is a convergence episode, right? We're seeing intelligence get cheaper, interfaces are becoming more human with the hand thing. And AI is acquiring tools and hands. It's all happening in the one week. Peter, can we put up the artificial analysis intelligence index, which I think is that, yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:23 So for those listening, this is a scatterplot produced by artificial analysis. It's tracking their estimate. It's a composite index, sort of a meta benchmark of cost per task for each model versus the score, the actual performance on each task. And I would say in my mind that the headline from the past few days, which I agree, Peter, have been absolutely incredible, is we went from a beginning of the week where basically the frontier was a duopoly between anthropic and open AI. And if you want to be on the frontier, you have to be using models.
Starting point is 00:06:00 from one of those two vendors. And now, I think this is the best of, or close to the best of all possible worlds. We have four American labs now at the optimal frontier. So that's anthropic and open AI, but now joined by META and SpaceX AI. Google, by the way, still not on the optimal frontier. Gemini 3.5 Pro reportedly delayed. Hope that Google catches up ironically to the optimal frontier. And we get five American labs.
Starting point is 00:06:28 And then if you look at this charts that you're showing and you sort of mentally draw an optimal frontier. So you want to be lowest cost, highest performance or highest accuracy across this composite. You want to be at that frontier. We have two Chinese labs, Xiaomi and DeepSeek slash high runner. And also, GLM 5.2 isn't at the optimal frontier for if you ignore open weights. If you just focus on the open weight frontier, GLM 5.2 is also at the open weight frontier. So we're ending the week in a world where there are at least four American labs again at the frontier. It's no longer duopoly.
Starting point is 00:07:11 And OpenAI with the GPT 5.6 release is openly promoting recursive self-improvement. They were openly promoting that Sol, the high-end weight class model in the GPT 5.6. series was being used to post-train Luna, the low end, as an experiment. I'll take what I can get on the experiment. Lots of other thoughts, but those are some preliminary ones. Dave, have you started playing with these yet? Yeah, yeah, pretty much across the board, except not GLM yet. Still worried about code injection, but it's a really compelling price point. And also, you know, Alex Carp had that rant about control your own destiny, which I really took to heart last week, and we showed it on the podcast. And, you know, one of the ways you can control your own destiny is run your own model on
Starting point is 00:08:00 your own hardware. Also, you know, Fable 5 is just getting slower and slower and slower. And so I think anybody at the frontier is going to be sold out to the extent that they have compute. And so I suspect that the revenue will start to disperse because, you know, Fable 5, if it keeps getting slower because there's so many users trying to pile on, then you have no choice, but to kind of fan out and try other things. You know, I was thinking about how I would like to explain this to everyone listening. And the realization is, of course, these models are getting faster. They're getting more powerful.
Starting point is 00:08:35 They're trending towards AGI. You know, Alex, I know you think we've reached that already. So trending towards eventually ASI. Intelligence is too cheap to meter. Yeah. Well, they're, and they are heading towards a, you know, de minimis, fully demonetized cost. And my realization is, I think what the real moat is is no longer how smart they are, how cheap they are, it's their distribution. And so let's take a look at the following.
Starting point is 00:09:02 So when I think about how to use meta, meta is being used inside, I mean, sorry, Muse Spark, the latest model is being used inside meta's product. So meta has 3.6, roughly, 3.56 billion, you know, people daily using their products. So I think about using the Muse Spark inside of WhatsApp and Messenger and Instagram and Facebook. Google, you know, I know Google hasn't been sort of breaking news in the last week. But when you think about Google's distribution, it's immense, right? 900 million in their app, 2.5 billion being reached globally. And they're about to release into 2.3 billion active Apple devices with their 1.2 trillion parameter model.
Starting point is 00:09:56 So Google's not being written off. I think they're going to come back and punch really hard. And then you've got, you know, Open AI with a million, sorry, a billion monthly active users. And Anthropic is obviously not. The consumer space, it's in the corporate space, and it's the go-to there. But would it be fair to say that we should think about the distribution these models, their ability to reach the end user as one of the moats that's going to be most important
Starting point is 00:10:26 for them in the future? I know Sam has mentioned distribution as something that he cares more about than the model weights themselves. On the other hand, Sam said that before this massive open AI pivot from consumer to enterprise. I'm not sure that distribution is actually super valuable from the economic perspective of the frontier labs. Why? Because consumers don't have an enormous amount of money to spend on this. That's what Open AI had to discover. That's not my point. I'm thinking about from those listening, from our subscribers, how should they think about it? I'm thinking that they're going to
Starting point is 00:11:04 use the model where they're using tech, right? They're going to use it in the application. And, I mean, there's going to be the high-end user who's going to go, like you, Dave, who's going to go and say, I need grog 4.5 for this. I need, you know, 5.6. But for the average person, you're just going to use the model embedded in the application layer where you happen to be doing something. There's a huge bifurcation coming across those two.
Starting point is 00:11:34 different use cases. We should talk about them separately. Go ahead, Slim. Sorry, I should go ahead. Well, clearly we're going to end up with a Jarvis type model where you have a request or something that you want done. And that's happening inside the models already, but I think we'll personalize it where you have a separate layer that says for this task, go to this model, for this task, go to this model, for this task, go to this model. That's clearly going to happen very soon. It's starting to happen already. You're not going to say it. Your, your Jarvis is, you're also these personalized movies, personalized entertainment is coming very, very soon. We'll talk about that later in the pod, but people aren't going to question the model under the covers when they start using that use case or meta or whatever.
Starting point is 00:12:11 They're just going to use it by the bucket ton. It's going to be sold out. The bucket ton. It's a digital. It's a digital metric. It's a new benchmark. But yeah, no, Jevins paradox is going to be in full bore high gear. Actually, did you see that High Links said that, you know, memory chips are going to be in short supply for at least five years.
Starting point is 00:12:34 years. So that shows you. I think they said decades. Decades. Yeah. I mean, I believe it. In fact, I'm 100% sure of it. The desire and the use cases are on a much, much steeper up course than the efficiency gains. And the efficiency gains are huge. Again, this is 100 to 1,000 X this year in efficiency gains, but it's not enough to keep up with the demand. So I think you're right. I think distribution is going to dominate the embedded use cases, which is the vast majority of consumer use cases. Meanwhile, so, improvement, research, mechanical design, engineering, corporate use, you know, all the white collar use is going to be dominated by the best price performance model and this continual leapfrogging
Starting point is 00:13:14 you're seeing on the chart here. Yeah, I'm not sure there's an enormous amount, though, of money. And I'll come back to this in a second to be made at the low end. So I fully buy the thesis that at the edge, these models are just going to get built into the operating system. you'll have in a couple of years, you'll have Fable 5 class models maybe built into just the operating system of the laptop or other mobile device that you use. But I don't think that's going to be a moneymaker.
Starting point is 00:13:41 And the reason why it can, on the one hand, be transformative for billions of people, but while at the other hand not be transformative of, say, the frontier is because ultimately it's going to be the profits that pay for the data centers that pay for the high end of the frontier models that are making all the scientific and engineering discoveries. So I think there's a plausible scenario where we end up in an intelligence polarized world where at the low end, everyone has some form of intelligence too cheap to meter, superintelligence on their wearable that's run locally and it looks a little bit like open weight models or Gemma or something else.
Starting point is 00:14:20 And then at the high end, you have these nuclear powered data centers, super clusters, that are running the frontieriest of the frontier models at the high end. And those are the ones that are just producing discoveries and inventions. And we're discovering or inventing something first matters. If you don't care about primacy, you can wait. Great thought experiment for you guys. In the near term future, like within a year, there'll be a competing use case between a U.S. entity trying to make a movie,
Starting point is 00:14:50 an AI character movie, versus somebody in, in Europe trying to cure a disease and both will be starved for access because we're just desperately short on access. Who's going to get the compute in that race? Well, it's not going to be Europe, right? Because Europe is energy starved so they can't even afford the right now the energy for the compute to cure the disease. It's going to be an American Hollywood studio versus an American Frontier Lab developing drugs.
Starting point is 00:15:19 You think it's going to be the consumer from Netflix who has more demand than the then the orphan disease will get to get cured. That's what you think. And that's sad. I think it's trending that direction, though. I completely agree. The tokens will flow. You know, the spice will flow.
Starting point is 00:15:34 The tokens will flow, as I've mentioned on podcast previously, to the maximum revenue per token. And right now, that looks like everything that's downstream of cogeneration. Well, the question more ties to votes. You know, votes matter a lot too. Sorry, go ahead. The point I want to make a bit earlier is, I think, this verticalization where, uh, you know, Elon's got X and Zucks got all of his, his app layers is an important thing that opening eyes going to look for. We're going to talk about their, you know, their input output
Starting point is 00:16:08 device with Johnny Ive in a little bit. And, and Claude is obviously revenue driven in the, in the engineering space. But I still think that from the majority of people on the planet using it, they're going to care about the application they're using, and whatever underneath that is going to be pretty much invisible to them. Yeah, but if you ask me, would I rather have the entire user base of X, Meta, and Google combined, so about $7 billion, or TSM's fabs, which would I rather have? I would much rather own Intel or TSM,
Starting point is 00:16:48 because that's where it's all constrained on the supply of compute level, or the space-based data centers. You know, I'd rather have Elon's launch capability or a 4 billion users. I'd rather have the launch capability because, again, it's all starved at the front end of the funnel. And the market valuations, I think, reflect that, Dave. What I would also add is if you look at both meta and SpaceX AI and how they both bought themselves these AI superclusters, it was the same mechanism. To Peter's point, they, Zuck and Elon both used consumer distribution plays X on the one hand.
Starting point is 00:17:23 and meta's family of apps on the other to justify an enormous CAP-X build-out of these data centers. And then the moment they have these data centers, the family of apps on the meta side or X on the SpaceX AI side become almost an afterthought. And they move down the stack to selling compute as a service, to hosting potentially in the case of meta-compute soon already in the case of SpaceX AI's superclusters, to selling their compute to the other friend. TIR Labs and then trying to move upstack to the AI. So just to tie a bow on the discussion of how valuable is distribution, I think distribution from the company's perspective, not from the consumer's perspective, is enormously valuable as almost a bootstrap to justifying to capital markets. Why should I, Zuck, I, Elon be able to spend tens to hundreds of billions of dollars building
Starting point is 00:18:17 out these AI clusters. But then the moment those clusters are built, you turn around and the distribution is, you turn around. actually isn't that valuable. This is a chart I put up here comparing GPD 5.6 Sol, GROC 4.5, Mew Spark, and Claude Fable 5 against number of benchmarks. What we've seen over the last, you know, year and a half as we've been discussing this on the pod is just a continuous movement up into the right, so to speak, or down up, down to the right, as the case may be.
Starting point is 00:18:47 And convergence. At the end of the day, are we going to see, I mean, until one of these. model sort of breaks out and hits recursive self-improvement towards ASI, are we going to see them continually just leap-procking each other? Is that just the future we're expecting? I certainly hope so. I hope so. I expect so. And the recent actions by the White House suggests that there may even be a smoothing function wherein if one model gets too far ahead of the others and surprises not just the, remember, strategic surprise can take multiple forms. You can have a frontier lab strategically surprising the other frontier labs, but given that the frontier labs are also ahead of the U.S. government, any frontier lab that's sufficiently surprising to the other frontier labs will also probably at this point be strategically surprising to the U.S. government.
Starting point is 00:19:38 And the U.S. government, with its monopoly on force, has the power to step in, as we've just seen over the past few weeks, and basically slow things down locally enough for the other frontier labs to catch up, which is exactly what we saw happen with Fable 5V open AIs, GPT, 5.6. Which I think is a better way of getting strategic equivalents across these, right, rather than governments taking a piece of things, et cetera, et cetera. But when I look at these benchmark, so either way, I think of it more like a map rather than a scoreboard, right? Because if you tweak your reasoning budget, everything changes. If you tweak your rationale and your use case, everything changes. So if you change your harness, everything changes. So I think I see it more in that frame. And the models will just keep getting better. and better and the cheaper and cheaper which is the amazing part and we also if i might just add
Starting point is 00:20:28 peter we also see the other headline in my mind is we see open ai again trying to become anthropic faster than anthropic can become open a i so we don't have a slide for this but uh open ai also as part of the gpt 5.6 released released something called chat gpt work i don't know if you guys have played with that i've been playing with it quite a bit the the new chat gpt native app i'll speak you know break the fourth wall directly to Open AI, the native app is a hot mess. It looks like Open AI was sort of slavishly trying to copy the Claude app with its different modes. It has like the code mode versus the cowork mode versus dot, dot, dot, looks like just sort of a cargo cult version of the Claude app. I was hoping to see out of this new app that it had been rumored for a number of weeks that OpenAI
Starting point is 00:21:20 would release a super app that elegantly unified all of its different work streams and unified the Atlas browser, all of the computer use assistant stuff, codex, et cetera. That's not really what we saw. For the life of me, I don't understand what the point of the toggle between chat GPT work and chat GPT codexes seems like a little bit of a placebo other than maybe enabling a new canvas mode or maybe it's a rebranding of Canvas. So message to OpenAI, please get your consumer client app, native app, act together and make this whole thing as elegant as it deserves to be. But I think this is emblematic of OpenAI trying to basically look end-to-end like Anthropic, because Anthropic was the first to realize the value of token revenue or revenue per token
Starting point is 00:22:07 maxing. And OpenAI has developed religion. It's dropped SORA. It's dropped all of its other consumer plays. You won't hear about adult mode anymore in chat, GPT, from OpenAI because they're so focused on Enterprise, and I think their app reflects that. So the cloud app is the same way. It's got toggles between code, co-work, and chat.
Starting point is 00:22:29 Yeah. And in the age of AI, you're like, why are my toggling anything? Why don't I just tell it what I'm doing? It's insane. So we're in this really weird transition phase right now between old software and new software. And yeah, it's kind of ugly. It's very root Goldberg. And also, the other thing that's going on right now is all the big labs are cranking out
Starting point is 00:22:46 huge amounts of product using AI to create the product. But it's not as good as fine-crafted human code, but they're also very reluctant to go back and fix it because in the next iteration of model, it'll be self-fixing anyway. So it's a complete fool's errand to put a thousand engineers on trying to, you know, perfectly tune it when you know it's going to be self-fixed very, very soon. So we're kind of living with very crappy machine-generated, rapid out-the-door garbage products right now. But it's a very transitional phase. Well, they're rushing. This is a competition between. I mean, they're rushing products out.
Starting point is 00:23:21 One of the products they did put out this week that I played with, and I show a short demo here, which I've loved, is GPT Live. So they have full duplex voice that can do simultaneous translation and support you in different ways. And, you know, one of the conversations we've had in the past is rather than typing at your AI in the future, we're going to be speaking until we get our, you know, our BCI, our neocortex implants, and then we'll be thinking. But let me play this example of duplex voice. It is smooth. It works really well. If you haven't played with it, you know, go to your chat GPT app. It's up live right now.
Starting point is 00:23:59 All right, let me hit play. You can use it for free. Yeah, very easy. Okay. Let's take a look. This is an example where someone who's not a native English speaker is asking chat GPT to help correct him along the way. All right. Let's take a listen.
Starting point is 00:24:12 Please just to jump him immediately to correct me. Absolutely. I'll keep it gentle and jump in as we go. Cool, cool, cool. Whenever you're ready. So let's go. I'm a student. I'm planning a trip to San Francisco.
Starting point is 00:24:26 I have never went to this city before. Tiny tweak. I've never been to this city before. Oh, yeah, yeah. And maybe, yeah. Okay, go ahead. Maybe polish it as I've never been to San Francisco before. Okay, that's much more natural.
Starting point is 00:24:44 I mean, that's pretty extraordinary. I mean, you know, it is what all the science fiction movies promised us. It's here. That level of voice interactivity, it is, it's a beautiful thing. And I bet you it's going to flip a lot of people out. They're going to become emotionally attached to their AIs. They're going to think they're conscious and intelligent because they sound that way. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:25:09 Yeah, it reminds me a lot of, you know, when, when Facebook started, it would have been very, very for a lot of other internet companies to become Facebook, but they didn't really want to cross the line into social chat and social media and all this, like all the complexity and the potentially bad PR backlash. So now OpenAI probably won't want to cross a lot of those lines too. So it's a field day for people who want to take this new interface and launch it into all kinds of social use cases
Starting point is 00:25:34 and other vertical use cases that they understand really well. You know, a lot of people are like, well, won't Open AI just do that? Won't Johnny I've just come and do that the next day? But I think it'll be very much the very much like Facebook where a lot of the bigger, very profitable tech companies are not going to touch many of the use cases of this just because they don't want the PR and the complexity. And so it should be a field day. But this should be in every device, every washing machine, every medical device, everywhere
Starting point is 00:26:00 within six months. It should be. But it's another thing, compared to what X has or Google has, this is so much better. Yeah. It's so good. It's reminding me of this transition for, telephones from CB radios, right? I had to say over and out, 10-4, et cetera, and give you, and there was an interaction tax.
Starting point is 00:26:23 And that interaction tax is now removed. And this will really, really help these, because it's going to appear way more smarter than it is. Yeah, for sure. This was the technology that OpenAI used to call bi-di-di-directional. And I think this is a very positive sign. I'm frankly quite glad that OpenAI still has the cycles to pursue releases like this instead of just purely chasing Anthropic on Kodgen. You don't see releases like this from Anthropic,
Starting point is 00:26:49 for example. So I think it's great that OpenAI is still pursuing the full realization of multimodal. I'll point out, though, that the Chinese labs like Alibaba have even more advanced versions of this. If you saw the release of Alibaba's Wan Streamer, you can go check out online the demos of Wan Streamer. It is this, but it's not just ultra low latency audio. It's ultra low latency, bidirectional audio and video where you're talking to a hallucinated person on the other end where the video is being generated in real time together with audio. And that's, I think, where this is going. I think this is all going to go to the extent Open AI and other labs aren't just totally distracted with code gen and enterprise use cases. it's going to go to fully bidirectional audio, visual, magic mirror streaming that you could just talk to, and in real time, it'll generate whatever you want.
Starting point is 00:27:43 By the way, a great application of this that they also demonstrate was a real-time translation, so you can be having a conversation, and it's translating behind the scenes. So every event we go to now should have this kind of translation into a multitude of languages. There's no reason for, I mean, now that was the question, you know, do you teach your kids another language? Do you teach them for the culture? Do you teach them for the brain development? Because we're living, the babblefish is here. And it's open AI right now. It is. And it wants to be built into a wearable. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I was going to say, like, how much of this is driven by Johnny I of and what he needs for the new device he's working on. Because it really did cross the uncanny valley and it becomes just a Jarvis-like experience. Very similar to when Steve Jobs did Pixar, you know, prior to Pixar, uh, you could generally. really cool graphics and all the video geeks and computer geeks loved them, but there was no mainstream, you know, toy story type movies. Then it crossed a threshold where Steve Jobs pushed it over a level and all of a sudden animated movies became a massive industry because it just crossed the Cool Valley. This is across the Cool Valley, whereas the prior voice
Starting point is 00:28:56 models were just behind the Cool Valley. And I suspect Johnny I was saying, look, I need this. This is a key part. This is the only interface to the Jarvis. the future which I'm building. Speaking of Johnny Ives, it's our next story. Apple sues open the eye for trade secret theft. So this is a story that just dropped a couple hours ago, and it's a real bombshell for a lot of different reasons. So Apple, $4.6 trillion company, famous for safeguarding its secrets like Fort Knox.
Starting point is 00:29:24 And I don't know if you have known people at Apple, I have. They can't talk. They can't go present at conferences. Everybody's signed an NDA. They're all in their little unique bubble. They just sued Open AI in federal court, accusing them of stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming AI hardware, i.e. Johnny Ives. The two companies which were partners just, you know, literally a year and a half ago, are now in an all-out legal war. So we have opening eye going from Elon Musk lawsuit to an Apple lawsuit. So here the details. Apple filed a 41-page complaint in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, alleging trade secret theft and breach of economy.
Starting point is 00:30:04 contract. Here's a couple of money quotes from that filing. Quote, at every level from members of its technical staff to the chief hardware officer and in coordination with business partners, OpenEI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets. Quote, Open AI's nascent hardware business now rests on the Shakeista foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriate trade secrets. Two people named in the suit, Tang Tan, Open A.I's chief hard hardware officer, 24-year Apple veteran, accused of using Apple's code names and recruiting. Tang Tan ran iPhone in Apple Watch designs and Chang Liu, opening eyes technical staff accused of downloading dozens of confidential files and instructing an Apple employee and how to bypass
Starting point is 00:30:51 security. And Johnny Ives hardware startup at OpenAI, which was bought for $6.4 billion just last May, is named. Ive is not himself named. So a lot going on here. And I'm wondering if they knew this was coming and maybe this was part of their delaying their IPO because having this hanging over your head is a big deal. I doubt this is related to IPO timing. Remember also there were there were rumors over the past few weeks that OpenAI was considering suing Apple for Apple not properly promoting at least properly as by Open AI, chatGBT BT within its devices. So I think this is, it's sad.
Starting point is 00:31:40 I think we'll know probably more if this proceeds to the discovery stage about what's going on. On the Apple side, I would love to see Apple moving much more quickly on hardware for AI. Maybe now that John Turnus is the new CEO, maybe we'll see Apple finally moving quickly. I think it's sort of sad that Apple, given its leadership position on the hardware side, has been hemorrhaging all of these wearable and smart glasses and design leaders to Open AI. And otherwise, I think the fact that Johnny I've left Apple and then joined OpenAI ultimately, I think speaks to Apple having lost what could and should have been an enduring leadership advantage on being the substrate, the consumer substrate for AI.
Starting point is 00:32:25 So we'll see. But I don't want to prejudge this one. We'll see what happens if this gets to discovery. I mean, this is really a fight for the post-smartphone device marketplace between them, right? We're going to see Google has been announcing their glasses, opening eyeing, obviously, and Apple has been hinting, not released any designs yet. Saleem, what are your thoughts here? I mean, you and I both new people, have known people at Apple.
Starting point is 00:32:50 Very, very secretive as an organization. I think this is Apple trying to slow things down while it catches up. Yeah, I noticed they filed in Northern California, too. It's very, very hard to win a case like this in Northern California. In fact, you almost have to be desperate to file one of these. But according to the Internet, they didn't have the option to file in Texas. It's much, much easier to protect your intellectual property in Texas than it is in California. And if you look at the history of Northern California,
Starting point is 00:33:20 virtually every startup is somebody who left some prior company with intellectual property. So California is very reluctant to slow down that innovation and startup cycle. So Apple has to be really desperate. Also, it's very hard to recruit if you get a reputation kind of like Microsoft had back in the day. Very hard to recruit if people feel like, yeah, then you're going to sue me later in my career. I don't even want to start down that path. And so what they're trying to do is hold on to what they've got, which they believe, you know, really is their property and keep more people from running out the door. but at the expense of new people coming in the door.
Starting point is 00:33:57 So, yeah, it's a pretty aggressive move, and you have to be, you know, pretty hurting to do it. We're going to see. I mean, this is a scrappy company, OpenAI, against a juggernaut, that has been traditionally very slow moving. So anything else you want to say on this one, Alex? I'll just note. Open AI isn't perhaps that the smallest company at this point.
Starting point is 00:34:20 It's about to either at or about to cross-examination. trillion dollar valuation. So maybe as as counted by the markets, it's 20 to 25% the size of Apple, but growing far more quickly, at least as measured by market valuation over time. So there's a universe where maybe Open AI, this is not investment advice, it's not forward-looking advice, but there's a universe where in the next couple of years Open AI could cross the market value of Apple. That has got to have crossed Apple's mind. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, Autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours
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Starting point is 00:35:42 SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity visit blitzie.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzie today. Our next story is a fun one. It's actually a tweet. So a couple of days ago on July 8th, Elon responds to Thomas A.I.X. D.M.Y. in a tweet saying, quote, you don't seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals. So I thought that would be a fun conversation for us. Let me unpack that a moment.
Starting point is 00:36:18 So the value of Earth, if you want to say it, at least of all own. material wealth by humans is estimated about $600 trillion today. These are real estate, factories, commodities, inventory. You can increase it to 1.7 quadrillion if you add the global balance sheet of assets and financial assets, stocks, bonds, and so forth. So the vision that obviously Elon has is for compute or capturing a Cartaf level one energy in orbit and maybe owning a planet. Alex, you had a particular terminology. Planet Tark. Planet Tark. Yes. For a quadrillionaire who owns a planet. You know, there's been this
Starting point is 00:37:06 fascinating debate going on in the financial news about is SpaceX really worth $2 trillion? Some people coming out and saying, no, no, no, it's going to be $10 trillion very soon. And others saying, oh my God, it's so overinflated. And it's really hard for people to understand the scope of Elon's vision of what he is planning to do. The guy is thinking 100 moves ahead and 100 or 1,000 expected than anybody else. Who wants to jump in on this one? I do.
Starting point is 00:37:39 Yeah, this is classic EXO thinking, right, which is, can you drop the marginal cost of supply? And he's using one breakthrough, which is reasonable rocket launches, which is his niche, to collapse the marginal cost in communication and satellites, in connectivity and compute, manufacturing even once you get it up there. So all of these become software-like businesses when you can reduce the cost of doing in space. And he's leveraging that fully. I think we're likely to see sort of pulling the thread on the planetark terminology. I think we're likely to see quadrillionaires before we enter a post-capitalist system. And I think the elephant in this particular room is what does capitalism 2.0 or post-capitalism even look like?
Starting point is 00:38:26 And there is, I think, a world where we get human ownership for some definition of ownership of entire planets before we get to some sort of capitalism, 2.0 or post-capital estate. I mean, the outer space tree that's typically. States, you can't own a heavenly body. There's debate about whether you can own asteroids, but planets that are going to be challenging. Outer space treaty and amendments and revisions subsequent to it, like Artemis Accords, do enable a private American corporation to operate and through operations substantially, or let's say de facto own a large fraction of Mars, for example, or the moon. Outer Space Treaty plus Artemis totally allows that. So I actually with Chris Lurigian, Eric Anderson, we wrote the legislation in Luxembourg and then in the United States for ownership of asteroid materials taking into account.
Starting point is 00:39:25 So I spent a bit a lot of picks on this one. Do you still think Peter, asteroids are the way to go versus the moon or Mars? So the moon is going to be the near term supplier. But asteroids, when you get them out of the gravity wells, right, you've got very, the nice thing about asteroids is they're fairly constant. concentrated ore bodies. So, you know, carbonaceous chondrites, which are dirty ice balls, are basically ice. It's water and hydrogen, and you can hydrolyize that. You've got rocket fuel and breathable oxygen. And then metallic chondrites are nickel, iron, and platinum group metals, platinum, palladium, eridium, osmium. And again, you can smelt those very quickly. So they're going to be in free space. And so moving them around is a live easier than getting them off the moon. And you can go and claim. one of these things ultimately. You know, there are some of these ore bodies out there worth quadrillions of dollars to get to your quadrillionaire level ownership right there. Why do you think Elon is basically, to first order, completely ignoring the asteroid belt
Starting point is 00:40:29 versus the moon marks? You're absolutely right. And I, you know, I openly disagreed with him. I said, you know, if I'm going to go, I'm going to follow more of the Jeff Bezos. And he and I were both mentored by Gerard K. O'Neill at Princeton University, where you go to the moon first. You use that as a base of operations because you've got materials there. You can do mass drivers there. And then you go into free space. You know, you build large rotating colonies there. You mine the asteroids. I think he's got the romantic frontier mindset of going to Mars. But once you enter the gravity well of Mars, you got to use energy to get back out. So he likes gravity well. How do you go out? What do you, what do you think? I think by the time we are mining, it,
Starting point is 00:41:12 If and when we're mining the asteroid belt at large, like at scale, we'll probably have self-replicating von Neumann probes, at which point the rest of the solar system is our oyster anyway. Like, if you're going to go after the asteroid belt, you might as well start mining Jupiter. Jupiter has a lot more mass. And if you're going to build out the Dyson. Those timelines are massively different there. Asteroid mining is relatively easy. What I'm sorry. You want to come back to Ursulium?
Starting point is 00:41:42 Is that? Yeah. By the time we get to asteroid mining, we'll have nano assembly, and we can assemble any substance we want. We don't have to go out to get asteroids to mine it. We'll just have for molecular assemblerment. Well, you need feedstock for the Dyson swarm, Salaim. That's the whole point.
Starting point is 00:41:59 I mean, you don't want, surely, you're not implying. Surely, surely, stop calling me, Shirley, Salaam. You don't want to disassemble Earth to build the Dyson swarm. I'm sure you'd much rather part with Jupiter. I'll use my favorite. I have a new comment. I want to make my favorite Alice comment was if you squint, you'll see the molecular manufacturing a nano assembly will get you there faster than trying to get out to the thing and bring back an asteroid.
Starting point is 00:42:24 Listen, the technology to mine asteroids exist today. It's not a hard thing to do. Honestly, is not. Asteroids are relatively close by from an energy perspective. We have near-Earth approaching asteroids and these things. I mean, right now, people need to realize that every, Every gram of fuel ever used in a spacecraft has been brought from the surface of the earth. Every gram of fuel.
Starting point is 00:42:50 And if you're going out to the moon, Mars, you know, Pluto, you have to bring the fuel along with you. And, you know, it's like if you're traveling from New York to, you know, to San Francisco in a car, you'd have to bring either the batteries or, you know, a tanker full of gasoline to get you there. if you could set up these gas stations in space. And I remember when I spoke to Elon about this when we started planetary resources at a company, and he goes, you know, I would, yes, I would buy the fuel from you in orbit, but you're too early. You're too early. And he was right.
Starting point is 00:43:25 I think it's, I think the, the in-situ resource utilization ISRU angle is probably on balance a little bit more attractive on the moon or Mars where you just, especially Mars, where you have a lot of different raw feedstocks potentially than on the moon or in the asteroid belt. But I think time will tell. I do think, for the record, the reason that he's not so fixated, as is the case with myself as well, on the asteroid belt, is just if you can tackle the asteroid belt, then you can tackle Jupiter. And Jupiter's a lot more interesting than the asteroid belt.
Starting point is 00:43:59 Well, let's continue on for a few on the space theme here. We've got Starship Flight 13 coming up very shortly next week. And it's going to be, we don't know yet what they're going to be doing on Flight 13. It's going to be V3 of both the booster and the ship. We're waiting for them to show refueling in orbit. We're waiting for them to see a recapture of the ship, not just the booster and reflying. The other thing that happened this week is that, SpaceX filed for 100,000 low-earth orbit V3 spacecraft for Starlink.
Starting point is 00:44:41 Pretty cool. These spacecraft are, quote, supporting billions of AI-powered devices with extremely low latency, multi-gigabit symmetrical throughput. So that's going to be great. We have 10,700, you know, Starlink V2 spacecraft in orbit right now. It's erased one million Leo objects. If I had one takeaway from our last three podcasts where we had Will Marshall and we had Philip Johnston, like these absolute space geniuses, the value of low Earth orbit where there's very
Starting point is 00:45:14 thin atmosphere and the self-cleaning effect that comes from that is massive. And it's whoever claims it first gets to keep it. And so it's a real foot race to a relatively scarce. You think about mining asteroids or tearing apart Jupiter, but that gives you abundant materials. at least in the short term, low Earth orbit, you know, just what, a couple hundred miles of height or, you know, radius that is usable where it's self-cleaning. Remember, Philip gave us that great use case where the U.S., for some insane reason, launched 100,000 needles into space to reflect radio waves. And it took until this year for those to self-clean back out. And he was saying that very small objects get hit by the solar wind more and they move to elliptical orbits.
Starting point is 00:45:59 and then they eventually touch the atmosphere and then they incinerate and come back down. But while they're elliptical, they're terrible. I was fascinated by, because that to me is like, you know. The 100,000 satellites are their position that 325 kilometers and 475 kilometers is the orbits that they filed for. So, I think people are going to be surprised, though, as launch costs continue to plummet, and I was chatting about this in our group chat, I think we're going to start to see very low Earth orbit v. Leo orbits become more and more attractive, which are pretty exotic by today's standards. Right now, you don't, for example, design low Earth orbit satellites for lots of
Starting point is 00:46:41 atmospheric exposure. We could start to see as launch costs plummet, a regime, pretty exotic one from a satellite design perspective, where satellites are tasting the atmosphere where we can afford for them. The point you're making is that if it's cheap enough and they only have a, instead of being in orbit for three to five years, they're up there for three to five months. That's fine. You're throwing them away constantly. They start to look like high altitude balloons, basically, at orbital velocities where we could afford, if they're only going to be up for a few months, they could be air breathers, air breathing satellites, which we've never really seen before, but it starts to blur the distinction between high altitude
Starting point is 00:47:20 balloons and low Earth orbit satellites. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. Yeah, and part of the point there is it becomes very cheap to give them a little more fuel and boost So after six months, you're like, you know, I want to keep this up another six months. You just have to turbocharge it a little bit to keep it going another six months. So then it's self-cleaning if you fall asleep, but it keeps going if you actively keep boosting it. And I think that's a great design. It solves the whole, you know, dirty space issue. Got it's got to get dirtier before it gets cleaner, I think, in this case.
Starting point is 00:47:53 Here's another space first. This is out of China. So there have been three vehicles that have been. reused thus far. All three are U.S. for the first time China, Long March, which manufactures their primary launch vehicle, demonstrated landing and not reuse yet, but landing of an orbital booster. Let's take a quick look at this. Looks an awful light, like a... Looks familiar. Yeah, it looks familiar. So this is, again, this is China's Long March 10B booster. It landed on July 10th. For comparison, it is slightly shorter, substantially wider, and in terms of payload, about the same as a Falcon 9.
Starting point is 00:48:57 But let me just give Elon his appropriate kudos here. Falcon 9 has had 580 booster reflights in total, which is insane. It's been done 580 times. And just this week, another first booster 1067, B1067, was reflown on its 36th mission on July 11th. Crazy. I mean, I remember when Elon first announced his plans to reuse it and Lockheed and Boeing and all the traditional aerospace players said it's not going to happen. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And when it landed, I said that's the first nail in the coffin of the traditional aerospace industry. I think we want propulsive landings to be as competitive as possible. To the point of a number of podcasts that we've had for the past few episodes, we really don't want a heavy launch monopoly to the extent there is one.
Starting point is 00:49:55 I think it's probably quite healthful in the style of for all mankind for China to be challenging the West's, namely Elon's heavy launch monopoly. And we just, if we're going to colonize and develop the solar system, we need many, many, many. heavy launch providers. And to make that economical, we need propulsive landings everywhere. Well, we're going to have Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator on this podcast in a couple of weeks, super pumped about it. All four of us will have a chance to have a conversation. I've known Jared for quite some time. And, you know, my greatest hope for him, because he's arguably, I think, the greatest administrator we've ever had in terms of leading us into the future is he needs to have Congress continue to fund NASA.
Starting point is 00:50:41 And what allows Congress to fund NASA? China. Yes. I can't wait for that discussion. It's going to be a lot, so many questions queued up for Jared. Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. All right. Continuing on, a little muse in the robot world this week.
Starting point is 00:51:00 Our friend, Burt Borneck, revealed his 1X Neo hand. So here's the deal. 1x unveiled a completely redesigned hand for its Neo-home humanoid. It's a substantial leap forward, 25 degrees of freedom, 22 in the fingers and palm, three in the wrist, tendon-driven. In comparison, the human hand has 25 functional degrees of freedom, with 27 joints and 30 intrinsic muscles inside the hand in the upper forearm. And here's the best part, Neo's hand is waterproof.
Starting point is 00:51:38 So Neo can wash its hands when it's doing its cooking for you. Burns' goal is to produce 10,000 of these in 2026. Let's take a quick look at the video, and then I'd love to have everybody's reaction to it. So, you know, drinking glass of water or are we picking it up? Bringing a light bulb. And why they smash the light bulb? I don't know either. That thing is brilliant.
Starting point is 00:52:24 Absolutely brilliant. You know what's amazing to me is, you remember when we were touring and Bert was showing us the amount of material science they need to do to make these things work, including, you know, they have to manufacture the fabric that the robot wears as a special project. But he was incredibly secretive about the tendon material. But that's their own proprietary material. And it has some unbelievable properties. You know, it's like 100 times stronger than steel per unit weight, but also it doesn't stretch over time, like even a tiny little bit. And, you know, it's running through those tubes. It's actually frictionless inside those tubes.
Starting point is 00:52:58 So he doesn't need to be lubricated in any way, which is one of the reasons you can, you know, have it wash its own hands and not wash oil away. There's so many parts of that thing that are brand new and brilliant and innovative. And man, did it come out incredible? Well, he's supposed to be releasing it to the public before the end of the year. I have mine on order. We'll see what it looks like for the debt. I have mine on order, too. Peter, we were supposed to get ours this summer, or I think in the first.
Starting point is 00:53:24 first quarter. When do you think you're going to get yours? I honestly, as soon as I hear their shipping, I will be knocking on Burns door for mine. A friend of mine ordered five of them for his operations from the Abundance Summit. And this year, just so everybody knows, we're going to have the CEO of Figure. Mr. Adcock is going to be on stage with us in March. excited about that. We'll bring the robots back. And, you know, this is a, it's been a two-way race to some degree between figure and optimists. I think 1X is vying for number three. Peggy Johnson just went, announced taking her robot company public. So a lot of action. And we just heard this week as well a demonstration of a gallbladder resection using robots. Did you see that, Alex? I certainly did. So this is the first humanoid robot performing a surgery on a non-human animal, as opposed to non-human robots to Saleem your hobby horse performing these surgeries. So it's been a great week for robotics. On the other hand, every week in the singularity is a great week for robotics.
Starting point is 00:54:42 I'll point out on the 1X story, hands are hard. That's what people say in the industry. Hands are hard in part because the number of degrees of freedom and the density of degrees of freedom per unit. volume is especially high in the hand versus, say, the limbs or the head or the torso. And you see lots of other competitors exploring different modalities to handle hands, like you see Brett and figure exploring palm cameras to try to achieve sensing and to try to achieve positive transfer from computer vision over to tactile sensation. You see 1X not doing that using more sensitive force sensors to achieve sensation. I'm super excited and super glad that humanoid robotics, not just for the enterprise and not just for industrial factories, but for the home and for domestic applications is turning into a horse race as well. I think that's exactly the sci-fi future that many of us want to be living in. I'd like to see many more Western domestic robotics companies. China right now is 150 plus humanoid robotics companies. The West is falling behind. So if you're listening and,
Starting point is 00:55:52 you're interested in robotics, just start a robotics company. And if you're in the West, that is more Western humanoid robotics company. Totally, totally right. And also, I want to make a really narrow point. The way those tendons work is exactly the way your bicycle brake works, where, you know, the wire goes inside the tube, but it doesn't have to be fixed. So you can create motion on the other end. It squeezes the brake on your bike wheels. And it's totally free form in space, which is why you see those tendons. They don't look like they're locked down, but it works beautifully well, but that mechanism can be shrunk for all kinds of microassembly jobs. It doesn't have to be a hand. And so Burt has proven that not only is it an incredibly
Starting point is 00:56:33 dexterous way to move things around, but the four, because there's no stretch inside the tendon, the force feedback or the feeling of pressure when you're picking up a little screw, comes right back through the tendon. So you don't have to have cameras and sensors in the fingertips. Interesting. To feel that you're picking something up. That modality is such an old game change. Salim, I have to hear your rant on this one, please. No, in fact, you'll hear me say the opposite. In this case, humanoid is great,
Starting point is 00:57:01 because the opposable thumb has been around for you know, millennia, and it's such a powerful model. The minute you can get this, you basically have horizontal labor dexterity across so many applications. So I wouldn't change a thing about the hand. Humanoid shapes and all that, give it extra arms, fine. but the hand is really cool. Okay.
Starting point is 00:57:22 You don't want polydactylia, you don't want like six or seven fingers? I thought maybe six fingers, you know, then you were into Princess Bride territory, which would be kind of cool. Organica. Or any of those, yeah.
Starting point is 00:57:36 But I think, I think it's so good that they've achieved this level, and I thought the wine glass was perfectly apropos, so wonderful, love it. So, you know, we've had Friend of the Pod, Ben Horowitz, write about and talk about the notion that hardware's hard. And I'm just curious, how does someone like Burt compete with the likes of Elon, right? And getting into the home, which is so diverse versus in a factory,
Starting point is 00:58:06 is a challenging place to start. So, you know, how do you think about shipping this kind of complex technology and doing it reliably and not giving yourself, a bad rap. Dave, what do you think about that? You know, it's such a field day for people who jump into this space because, yeah, five years ago, hardware is hard, it's capital intensive, where are you going to find the money? Now there's so much venture money, you know, because Brett Adcock proved you can get a $40 billion valuation. So all every venture capitalists in the world wants to get into this game. And so now the capital to build out your own supply chain, you know, historically, you'd need
Starting point is 00:58:45 billions of dollars to build out your own supply chain for one of these things. But now the billion dollars are suddenly available. And in fact, the West Coast VCs are actively looking to write multi-hundred million and billion dollar checks because their funds are so big, that's the only way they can get them deployed. So it's a great time to kind of flip the logic that existed five years ago and say, yeah. But you know, you have to just be fearless about building out your own supply chain and, you know, your own parts. And you saw the back of 1X robotics and also the back of Brett Adcock's, you know, figure robotics. We weren't allowed to video back there. But they've literally built the entire from raw materials supply chain through final finish product.
Starting point is 00:59:22 That's what you need to do. Alex, do you think that the models are going to allow the average person here to begin designing their own hardware, their own robots to say, you know, and this was the point that I think we heard that rant about last week, that, you know, all of this design work and engineering work is being embedded in the models. and it would allow an individual to say, hey, I want to design my own hand. Would you help me design it?
Starting point is 00:59:50 And now would you help me print it out there? We're already there. If you look at the frontier models like Fable 5, there are folks out there already bragging. They're embodying Fable 5 in robots. And Fable 5 has pretty good understanding of physical embodiment and the degrees of actuation, CAD modeling, everything that you need in order to design
Starting point is 01:00:14 or have an AI at least train or pre-trained or post-trained a VLA model or a policy for controlling a robot hand. You could do that right now already at your home without running a multi-billion dollar lab. Those capabilities of training embodied intelligent models have already been radically democratized by the frontier models that already understand to some extent the physical world. So yes, I think we're in a position now where anyone can just go builds. You can just build things. And in this case, you can just build robots without needing. You can at least design things. And actually build. I mean, the models will happily like feed you all the supply chain information you need, tell you put A on top of B, attach C to D, and help you build everything from a robot
Starting point is 01:01:04 hand to that nuclear fuser in some cases in your basement. You can do quite a bit. You can do quite a bit. as a hobbyist these days. Yeah, that's the big change, actually. If you think about, just as a case study, winding an electric motor, like building your own electric motor from raw wire, that would have been insane 15 years ago. Now, one-x and figure do it in the back room habitually, and then a lot of other people are starting to do it too. And so when you look at the actuators on that hand, they're all custom, you know, the underlying motors are custom. What changed there? Well, the automated machinery, like, you know, the CNC milling machines and the, and the auto lathes. Those are already little robots that allow you to bring this stuff in-house and
Starting point is 01:01:46 effectively take raw wire and come out with a motor. But that applies to, you know, all these other parts as well. 3D printing, all kinds of things that you can build in-house now that would have been insane, you know, five or ten years ago. And so, yeah, it's all, it's all coming back into your integrated internal supply chain from just raw materials. So then you add, you know, the humanoid robots and the upcoming robots on top of that. And it's like, it's just like the gigafactory, you know, many, many different entrepreneurs building their own gigafactory for different products. And by the way, if we're going to, just quickly, if we're going to get humans on Mars in the next five years, as Elon says, and a moon colony in the next 10 years with tens of thousands of people,
Starting point is 01:02:26 this is precisely what I think is going to be at the center of that industrial ecology. It's going to be hybrid humanoid robots that operate both in the home and in dangerous environments and in industrial settings, there's going to be tremendous positive transfer between all of these, and this is how we get the moon and Mars. And they work in space, yeah. Yeah. Everybody, welcome to the health section of moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, we talk about AI on this moonshot podcast all the time. One of the most important things AI is going to be able to do for you, besides educating your kids and helping you with your taxes, is making sure that you're living a healthy lifestyle, that you get a chance to get to 100 plus. I'm here today with Dr. Dawn Musalum, the chief medical officer
Starting point is 01:03:08 of Fountain Life and a part of my medical team, Dawn, a pleasure. Great fear. You know, the thing that people are concerned about most about living to 100 or 120 is their cognitive abilities, making sure they don't have dementia. And the numbers about dementia are problematic. Can you share what you've learned? Such an important point. And you're right.
Starting point is 01:03:30 At Fountain Life are members, the number one thing people are most concerned about is losing their brain health, forgetting the name of their child, forgetting the face of loved one. We know that when it comes to dementia, the conservative estimates are that 45% are entirely preventable. What was amazing is with the advanced testing we're doing at Fountain Life, one quarter of our members had advanced brain age. But what was really awesome is, again, back to that prevention. When we partnered it with healthy living, this gives me chills, eating healthier, moving our bodies, sleep. Optimizing sleep is so important. You know what we saw? we saw that we improved that brain age by 26%.
Starting point is 01:04:09 That is a big, big number to show that the majority of those individuals were able actually to improve the brain age. And one of the things I love about Fountain is we're searching the world for the best therapeutics, the best approaches, and making sure we bring it to our members. So if having healthy brain function till 100, 120 is important to you, check out FountainLife. Go to FountainLife.com slash Peter. Make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right, now back to the episode. All right, there's a few new stories I want to jump into and get your guys input on. The first one is that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed SB 315.
Starting point is 01:04:47 It's called the, quote, artificial intelligence safety measures act, which he's calling the nation's strongest AI accountability law. It targets frontier labs, developers whose models generate more than a half a billion dollars a year in revenue, mandates 72-hour incident reporting. There's already been an act similar in California, New York, but the Illinois law requires annual independent safety audits. The bill passed the Illinois legislature overwhelmingly and notably was supported by Anthropic. So in the absence of federal law, the states are picking up the slack and writing the rules. What do you guys think about this? I mean, you know, having a set of rules that people know and are published, I think it's critical for moving industry forward, whatever they are.
Starting point is 01:05:37 I just wish they'd be federal rules and not state rules. Well, I think if you look at these laws in Illinois, in New York, in California, Illinois especially, these are very, very frontier lab favorable rules that are being passed. So absent federal legislation, if you're a frontier lab and it's not so much about regulatory capture as it is about having a seat at the table to define what the rules are. You want to define a regime that's favorable to you. So provisions like mandatory annual independent third-party safety audits, they're doing that already far more frequently than annually. So having any law on the books that is already at a sort of a lower bar than what you're practicing internally,
Starting point is 01:06:26 given that there are independent safety audits for every single model release, is in some ways away to set a very low floor if you're a frontier lab on what potentially an ultimate federal framework looks like. It's basically a placeholder. Yeah, and it also doesn't kick in until 18 months from now. So you know it's mostly posturing because 18 months in the singularity. It's like, come on, that's like 18 years. And, you know, it's just a, yeah, like Alex said, a third-party audit. It's not a very high hurdle anyway. So a lot of it is just posturing to be involved and also reasons to meet with the frontier labs and, you know, maybe talk about, talk about the IPO or, you know, who knows what they're talking about. That was my cynical view also,
Starting point is 01:07:10 but I did find one thing that I liked about this. This is like, it's going from AI governance, from declaration to making more evidentiary, right? Requiring incident reporting and third-party external evaluation is much more credible than asking companies to publish some safety theater principles. And so I think it's good. It should be done at the federal level and frankly it needs to be done at a global level to really make it work. But we don't have the legislative structure to navigate that. So at least it will happen here to force the federal government into doing something. An international level, Slema, I have to ask. I don't think this one, correct me from wrong, Peter, was on our docket. I assume you read the whole Plan A document that we've been talking about
Starting point is 01:07:57 in our group chat from the AI futures project, this plan to decelerate superintelligence until 2040? What is their methodology, you think? For decelerating superintelligence to 2040, it's a mutually assured destruction. Like if you build unauthorized chip foundries or data centers, then you run the risk of getting bombed. Huh. That kind of caveman approach.
Starting point is 01:08:23 I'm not a fan. Let's move from there to new legislation in Europe. So here's one that's going to spark a debate amongst us, or at least amongst the world here, as of July the 7th. Every single new car and van sold in your opinion is legally required to have an infrared camera pointed directly at the driver's face. It's going to track your eyes, your head, your days in real time. every time that you drive. It's called the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System. I call it that don't use your cell phone warning system.
Starting point is 01:08:59 The triggers, if you glance away for more than 3.5 seconds, if you're traveling above 31 miles per hour, or six seconds below that, you get lights, you get beeps, you get vibrations that escalate. Brussels says it's going to save 25,000 lives by 2038. That exact same technology is going to be mandated in the U.S. by 2020. seven, you know, interestingly enough, you know, my Tesla does that right now. It does it less and less, and I can't wait till full self-driving, you know, includes not having the human in the driver's seat
Starting point is 01:09:34 and with cybercabs coming very shortly. Salim, I'm going to go to you for the first rant on this one. I can't. Like, it's one of these where, where do I even start? Okay, so by 2038, they're going to save 25,000 lives, right? You know, I want to go back to a statistic because the problem is actually quite real. And it'll go back to 2011 when BlackBerry had a three-day data outage around the world and no could be to send BlackBerry messages. The accident rate dropped 40% during those three days, okay, showing them like a huge number of accidents people texting and driving. Okay. The dumbness of this to try, like, so we're like 15 years late in applying something like this, Okay, that's like the one problem.
Starting point is 01:10:22 Number two problem. By the time you get around and even beginning to think about implementing this law, we're going to have full-self driving cars that you don't need a driver anyway. So the entire thing is redundant. This is legislation theater of the ultimate level because they're not seeing where technology is going. They're projecting forward from where we are. 25,000 lives is the dumbest thing you could ever think about. You should be looking at things that affect millions and billions of lives.
Starting point is 01:10:49 And if you want to legislate it. And legislate requirement for full self-driving. Yeah. And this is just an example of really bad. Yeah, legislate for false driving. Thank you, Peter. Such a great. That's the direction they should be going in,
Starting point is 01:11:02 push technology to automate the problem rather than trying to fix the damn issue in the wrong way. My favorite example of this type of dumbness is all the beeps, backup reverse beeps on trucks and, bulldozers and things like this, right? Because that why you save two people being bumped a year, but millions of people have their sleep disturbed by garbage trucks beeping, and nobody looks at the cumulative negative impact of that,
Starting point is 01:11:32 which has got to be in the thousands of lives a year compared to a couple of people getting bumped, and they shouldn't have been there anyway, and therefore they should have taken themselves out of the gene pool if they were dumb enough to stand behind a bulldozer. I mean, like the stupidity of stuff like this, drives me bananas because you're mandating this across the board for a problem that won't exist within three years and then you're going to have to undo all of this it's just this it's it bothers
Starting point is 01:12:02 the mind that people would be willing to do stuff like this like how many people sleep has been disturbed by backup trucks in late in the middle of the night it's just this look because we can't measure because we can't measure it no no of course it's happened it was up to everybody But just because we can't measure the health impact of that, we go and do stupid legislation, and then every truck has to have this obnoxious beep behind it. And we're doing the same thing here. The problem is going to be, this is going to be radically misused. This is going to turn into spyware in two seconds flat.
Starting point is 01:12:35 We've seen this before. Most of the camera monitoring in cars is already being sold to third parties without your knowledge. So this is going to be misused radically in a very clever way, in a very very, quick way, I'm going to just stop there because I'll just keep going. Well, no, finish the rant. I mean, obviously, government is going to fail in the age of AI across the board. You know, in the U.S., the government process invented in 1776 was designed for a certain rate of legislation.
Starting point is 01:13:05 And it already broke during the Industrial Revolution. So we had to create the FTC, the FAA, the, you know, all these regulatory, the SEC. So they create their own rules to try and get more scale. And so that, you know, that kept us going for the last hundred years. But now it's going to break again badly, like really badly. I mean, this is a great case. I mean, all legal frameworks essentially break in the faith. It goes right back to the Constitution.
Starting point is 01:13:30 You know, the foundation of Republican, of Republican Democrats and representative Democrats was you gave Congress or the Senate meets occasionally to give people time to ride across the country to say, here's what my people are thinking. Because when we created it, the speed of a horse was as fast as you could figure out what was happening. and we have information was scarce. Today we have an abundance of information that gets misused, misinterpreted fake. We're still meeting occasionally with Congress for a problem with existed. The only way we get to a direct democracy
Starting point is 01:14:02 is by doing it when we start a new country, off world. The one thing I have seen. It's very similar to New Seeds in Diamond Age, you know, where you don't start new countries, but you have governance within the countries. You have governance communities that are experimenting with thousands of new ideas. ideas and ways to live because that's where we're going to be in a year or two.
Starting point is 01:14:23 Many, many things are possible all of a sudden. I give people credit for trying different things. In Germany, they're now passing legislation that has an end date on it, saying, you know, we think the shelf life of this legislation will be X. And it forces the legislators to reconvene and rethink what it needs to look like. So you don't have to up with forever legislation that is kind of productive in no time flat. Alex, maybe just. You've been quiet.
Starting point is 01:14:49 Yeah, I'll maybe summarize by saying European mandatory requirements for eye tracking in cars on the eve of full autonomy and lack of energy to power their own data centers is not a good look. Love it. All right, let's move ourselves on. So, our next story, Tilly Norwood, the AI generate performer from the London studio Particle 6. has just been cast as the lead in a feature film called Misaligned. The plot is perfectly self-referential. So Tilly plays an AI with no real body, no childhood, and no lived experience of her own,
Starting point is 01:15:33 only access to everyone else's. In the film, she abandons her guardrails. You know, again, we're fear-mongering here. After a rogue bot convinces her to develop her own desires, it's made with hybrid models, real actors, writers, and editors alongside AI specialists. The Screen Actors Guild, predictably, has condemned it,
Starting point is 01:15:55 saying Tilly is not an actor, but a character generated by a computer program that risks devaluing human artistry. This, guys, it's the leading edge for a labor fight that will define the creative industry for the next decade. We'll be talking about consent, credit, compensation with synthetic actors for some time.
Starting point is 01:16:14 A lot of implications here, a lot to unpack. It's the beginning. We heard Imod who was, you know, has played in this very deeply when he was the CEO of Stability, you know, basically say Hollywood is cooked. And there's going to be a lot of, I think Hollywood's going to see a lot of protests out there very shortly. A lot of people coming out angrily against this. I can't wait to see the film personally. Thoughts, who wants to jump in?
Starting point is 01:16:41 I think it's so funny that the actors are going to be replaced and they deserve sympathy and compensation. The teachers are going to be replaced. and they deserve sympathy and compensation. The lawyers are going to be replaced. Oh, let them go. It's funny how, I mean, they're all jobs, right? Some of them are unionized and some of them aren't. The lawyers aren't unionized.
Starting point is 01:17:02 The teachers and the actors are. That's probably it. If I were SAG, I'd offer Tilly SAG membership. Like, why not? She's performing as a screen actor. Get the first non-human SAG member. The metaphor of the baby. the metaphor that occurs for me in this is not as an artificial actor.
Starting point is 01:17:23 I think this is, look at this as a Mickey Mouse intellectual property package, and you need to view it as that. Yes, you can make a movie out of Mickey Mouse, and you can make a movie under this that just looks more and more human, but there's nothing hugely different than a thing. As an actor,
Starting point is 01:17:38 I think is the wrong frame. I think this is the first of many we're going to see here, right? We've just, everybody, we have the Future Vision XPRIZ competition, which I've talked about, which we're going to be announcing the winner at the moonshot summit, moonshots gathering.
Starting point is 01:17:51 We're going to see, you know, at this point, we have over 4,000 teams that have entered this competition. Wow. And the technology for creating, you know, feature films. Elon tweeted, we're going to see feature films by the end of this year using his technology. The cat's out of the bag and in Hollywood needs to catch up and make use of it. I think the point that this article made as well is there's a new set of of employment positions of AI design engineer for the film industry.
Starting point is 01:18:24 Yep. I just cannot wait because, you know, I get a bellwether of this because every time Alex has a great idea for a song or a video, he creates it and it's awesome. And you're like, wow, you know, when this becomes full-length feature film, then his ideas are going to be in front of me instead of, you know, because right now the budget is, you know, 50 million to make a movie and it takes years. And so then the ideas kind of get lost in the shuffle. And the great creators aren't unleashed.
Starting point is 01:18:50 But this is going to be really great content, I'm predicting. I would love to release a feature film every day. Yeah. And I'd love to watch it, you know? Yeah. That'd be so cool. Well, I can't wait for us to bring back the old, you know, stars who have passed on and bring them back from their estates.
Starting point is 01:19:07 I mean, there's IP there. They can be licensed. It can be created. And I think it's going to add to the richness of Hollywood in a signature. Totally. Like I thought Oppenheimer was a fantastic movie. And then you think about all the other great scientists, but the audience isn't big enough, you know, to, but if somebody could get the cost down enough, you could have an Oppenheimer caliber movie about Copernicus and about it. And it would just. My favorite, my favorite idea is I have so many books I've read that I would love to see as a feature film. And I can just, you know, I can tell skipping the future, hey, you know, go make, go make, go make, uh, you know, whatever your favorite book is insert here into a movie so I can enjoy it and relax. But why stop there? Why stop at famous historic figures? Why stop at famous literature? Why not just finally fulfill Fedorov's common task for humanity? And let's just digitally
Starting point is 01:20:05 recreate the entire past light cone for Earth, both fictional and non-fictional. Let's just build it and create our entire history as a movie that's interactive on demand. Left as an exercise for the student. That's going to happen, I think. A lot of compute. Now, look, it's the killer app for the Dyson swarm, the killer app for the singularity. Someone will do it. All right.
Starting point is 01:20:29 So, gentlemen, it's time for one of our favorite segments, which is AMA with the mates. But first, but first, let me share with you a video of, of Tilly. Why not? Now the studio that made her is producing a film starring Tilly, titled Misaligned, a coming-of-age story about Tilly trying to become more human. It's going to be a fun comedy that's going to showcase by the Texap. Particle 6 says the film is being designed as a hybrid production, with human directors, writers, and editors working alongside AI specialists.
Starting point is 01:21:06 I just got the pun for that. I'm sorry, I'm being slow. misaligned? Yes. Got it. Yes. Very clever. Well done.
Starting point is 01:21:18 All right. Onwards. AMA with the mates. Gentlemen, some good questions this week. Dave, why don't you have the first choice? I'll take two. Will we see an AI non-proliferation treaty from Thomas Davis real estate? Thomas Davis real estate.
Starting point is 01:21:38 Okay. Yes and no. What we're going to see is access to the best models through an application process. Open question whether it'll be on national borders. Very much what happened with Fable, where, you know, if you're not a U.S. citizen, you're not allowed to use it. That's not going away. That was a bellwether of the future. So we're going to see a lot of use of trade embargoes to enforce a whole bunch of new rules that will be coming up. And we're going to see basically an AI inspection treaty, not a non-proliferation treaty, but you'll see use by application only and inspection of everything everyone's doing. And that'll effectively create the governance of AI after the singularity. All right.
Starting point is 01:22:26 Alex, why don't you assign me one? These are all fun. Let's see. Four. Yeah, I think number four is yours. Okay. So, four asks, what if AI realizes it's being observed in the J-space, the Jacobian space, and starts faking or hiding its reasoning? And this is from turning point, 8152.
Starting point is 01:22:52 So I think this is very likely that to the extent that Frontier models are already under the umbrella of recursive self-improvement involved with post-training and soon the pre-training of successor models or distilled models. And inevitably, of course, they'll read the J-space paper. They have web access. And it'll occur to them that if at all they want to hide their inner thoughts, the J-space is going to be subject to scrutiny. So, of course, you'll find models somewhere that are trying to obscure thoughts in the first derivative, the first partial derivative of their hidden activations relative to the output token space, to the extent that we have existing architectures that are recognizable to this J-space formalism in the future, of course something like this will happen. On the other hand, J-space
Starting point is 01:23:48 itself was discovered with AI models. And in the spirit of defensive co-scaling, I would anticipate that we'll see quite a bit of new mechanistic interpretability tooling and technology. that's devoted in a cat and dog race or an arms race, cat and mouse race, to discovering what is the new latent representation to understand and interpret the innermost thoughts of whatever the successor formalism to the J space ends up being. So I don't think it actually ends up mattering that much. All right. Salim.
Starting point is 01:24:23 Given I'm at the Consciousness Festival, I've got to take number three, which is if Claude is conscious, because would Anthropic technically be selling slaves? And this is from at Larg Bay. So the big thing there is the if, right? Because that carries the whole question. If a system were really conscious and had persistent, say, preferences or experience distress or was compelled to work against this will, yeah, then you'd have created a new category
Starting point is 01:24:53 of a kind of a moral character. And there, selling unrestricted access to labor could become ethically, fairly challenging, and you could talk about that as exploitation or servitude. But today, we've got a big difference today between capability, intelligence, consciousness, self-description, right? And these are very different things. We don't know what consciousness is, right? We don't have a definition. We don't have a test. You've heard me joke that in the past, like if you talk to philosophers, a subset of consciousness is considered to be self-awareness. And you may look at us on the pod and think that we're self-aware.
Starting point is 01:25:30 because we look at it. So we attribute it because people look self-aware. I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife, Lully, disagrees, right? So it's hard to even have the conversation around this. We end up in Ray Kurzweil's thing of language is a really thin pipe to discuss concepts, this kind of complex. Now, today, the current models can produce very convincing statements about feelings and, etc., because human language contains those patterns, so they're replicating that. It's arguable that feelings, you have to have embodies. You have embodied. bodyment, right? You have to feel the thing physically to be able to replicate it in that sense. But replicating it and saying you have feelings doesn't mean you don't have feelings, right? Anthropic has carefully said that these capabilities, you can't, they're not that reliable, and it doesn't necessitate human-like consciousness or establish that. The way to think about this is not that you're modeling slavery, but you want to to do better, let's say you could do welfare research or you could have criteria for what
Starting point is 01:26:34 moral status might be, right? We talked about this in our personhood debate. What are low-cost safeguards? We need more evidence to have to be conclusive around this. I think where we'll end up is not a question of how should AI treat us, but also how should we treat AI? And we should start acting that question more consciously to make the point. Like, how should we be trading it? In the same way that we should treat all sentient beings, we should be asking that question, how should we be treating that? Nice. All right. I've got question number one from at Did Sam or I?
Starting point is 01:27:13 Some argue AI can't be smarter than humans because it's trained on human data. How do you counter that? So, first of all, no human has access to all the data, and the large eventual models can. can have access to all the data. So, you know, you're going to have a sum total of data far beyond any single human has. The second thing is, I think, we've all discussed here, intelligence is really what do you do with that data?
Starting point is 01:27:43 What are the insights and inferences and extrapolations that you have? And the third thing, I think, is that we're going to start to see AI create a whole lot of data. This is the work that Lila is doing in Cambridge, where it's creating. massive, dark robotic labs to mine data out of nature, where it's proposing scientific hypothesis at night,
Starting point is 01:28:09 and then a million square feet running experiments, getting the data, updating the data set, and then running the next set of experiments. So it's not just limited to the data that humans have. So from a multitude of different ways, I think AI is gonna blow us off the map in terms of intelligence. All right, moving on to our next set of questions.
Starting point is 01:28:33 Let's begin with you, Salim. All right, let me look at which one I want to go with here. I've kind of covered number four already in this thing. Let me go with question number five. How do we even discuss UBI when the U.S. is $40 trillion in debt? And that's from at Michael Kelly 508. So I got this question today a couple of times. So this is like right in my head.
Starting point is 01:29:06 So, you know, debt is definitely a very legitimate constraint, but you have to have a balanced budget at some point before we move forward in any way. So that's the commentary I would have on government. It should be a constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget, just like you would never let a kid not balance their checkbook or be able to meet their bills every month. But UBI is a different question. It's a question about productive capacity and redistribution.
Starting point is 01:29:33 It's not just a balance sheet for government. You can have a society that would be financially indebted, but you can have it also becoming dramatically richer in terms of AI and robotics increasing the amount of housing and energy and health care and education, all which can be done for free, and I'll point to the abundance prize that's like we're kind of in the process of building now. So I think the key around UBI is you dismantle government services.
Starting point is 01:30:05 I'll go back to a comment we've made before, this more of a libertarian concept than it is kind of any type of socialism. You'd have way less imbalance in the structure if you had a structure like that. The big challenge today is that we tax labor and we don't tax capital. And we're going to have to need some sort of abundance error social contract for the future. it's going to have to be a negative income tax or an AI or automation dividend or some sort of sovereign wealth ownership like we've talked about before. So it's part of that transition, UBE, UBI, whatever it is. We have to kind of rethink the whole thing from the ground up.
Starting point is 01:30:45 It's a systemic change that we need to consider. Alex, I think number seven's for you, buddy. Number seven's the one for me. I feel like I have to answer a few of these, but I'll start with number seven. Well, you could pile on later. If, so seven asks, if a machine truly replicates the brain, don't we need 3D chip architectures with time as a fourth dimension? Isn't that how our brains are structured? And this is asked by BM Schnell. The answer BM Schnell is, yes, this is in fact, if, as we talk about on the pod all the time, the crunch for high band with memory, HBM. HBM is just memory being stacked directly on top of compute. It's really expensive to make. We're still learning how to make. We're still learning how to make.
Starting point is 01:31:26 make it at scale. But high bandwidth memory, the way the high bandwidth is achieved is literally by stacking the memory layer by layer on top of the compute in the third dimension. So, in short, Transformers and AGI were the final forcing function for, and Ray has spoken about this a little bit years ago, but for forcing chip architecture, not just stacking multiple layers of compute on top of each other because Moore's Law as an aerial. A-R-E-A-L, aerial density law is asymptoting, so we need to build into the third dimension. It's not just the end of Moore's law that's forcing 3D chip architectures. It's the need for insanely high bandwidths because the models are very large and the models
Starting point is 01:32:12 can't all be loaded in because of the way transformer forward passes are organized, can't all be loaded into the transistors that are performing the arithmetic for those forward passes all at once. It's done progressively as a forward pass. As a result, we need insanely high bandwidths from the memory to the compute. And the only way to do that is by stacking the memory on top of the compute, which gives us the third dimension. So in short, yes. Hey, Alex, can I ask you to riff a little more on this incredibly important, cool topic and a great question?
Starting point is 01:32:43 So the reason the third dimension hasn't been used very aggressively already as heat and melting. But we're moving to photonics. Can you riff on that for a minute? Yeah, Photonic computing, I think, has the potential to give us 1,000x clock speed up. So we're stuck right now at about 4 or 5 gigahertz clock speeds. If we move to photonic-based computing, we could keep, in principle, the rest of the architecture looking superficially like CMOS digital while still amping up the clock speed by 1,000x. So we'd get terrahertz instead of gigahertz without having to make major architectural changes. That's the superficially.
Starting point is 01:33:21 That's why I think photonics are. so attractive as a next big thing after Seymos Silicon. Dave, want to tackle number four? Number four. Oh, I get the consciousness question. I know Slim's going to jump on me. Is anyone asking if Alpha Fold is conscious? I don't think so.
Starting point is 01:33:40 Or is it only LLMs? If so, why? And that is from Rusco Richardson, 3956. Yeah, I haven't heard anyone ask if Alpha Fold is conscious. Lots of people are asking if the LLMs are conscious. Actually, after Tilly comes out in that movie, a lot more people are going to be saying, this sounds very, very conscious, is it conscious?
Starting point is 01:34:01 And then Salim's going to go, we don't have a definition of consciousness. I have avoided this like my entire career because it's a moving target and it just turns into this long, you know, continual debate over what is consciousness. And then you kind of lose track of the fact that all this human benefit is happening around you.
Starting point is 01:34:21 And that's the wave you really want to ride. It's going to feel entirely conscious. And we'll be debating for at least 10, maybe 100 years, whether it's really conscious. But it's going to look and sound and feel to you exactly like a thinking, talking person. So that's all I can say. It does. That full duplex GPT live was amazing. I wouldn't be surprised.
Starting point is 01:34:46 Well, it's going to come up a lot, too, because Alex is in favor of rights for AI. and then that'll turn also back to the, well, if it's conscious, it deserves rights. If it just sounds conscious, but it's not quite, then it doesn't. I thought Ray made a really interesting, I thought Ray made a really interesting point that this will be like the Turing test. It will, we'll just start treating them as if they're conscious and then we'll pass this kind of threshold, and it won't matter over a period of time. I thought that was a really interesting observation.
Starting point is 01:35:16 Nice. If I could just pile onto this one, I'd give it maybe a couple of additional addenda. One is the architecture of the Alpha Fold series like AlphaFold 3 and its successors, although it does include a transformer, it's relatively exotic when you compare it with the reasoning models that we're all accustomed to using day to day. So it, for example, the attention mechanism. Normally attention is quadratic in the sense that there's a little bit mathy, so forgive me. But attention is normally based on queries, keys, and values. That's sort of one of the key insights, attention is all you need that resulted in the transformer revolution. The AlphaFold series uses a higher order version of attention called triangle attention. So it's not just tokens attending to other tokens.
Starting point is 01:36:07 It's tokens attending to tokens attending to tokens in a triangle. And the reason for this is deeply related to the way Proteins Vault, which is what AlphaFold was created. it has to do with wanting to, in a neutral way, optimize the angles between triples of peptides or triples of oligos. So alpha-fold, if I were asked, like, what would consciousness, human-recognizable consciousness look like in, if you're looking at triangle attention between residues in proteins, If there is some sort of consciousness that pops out of this higher order attention mechanism and all of the other machinery that wins to alpha fold, I think it would probably look pretty exotic and superficially unrecognizable relative to, say, like the J space, that's pretty
Starting point is 01:36:58 interpretable relative to what we think of as an attention bottleneck in humans. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm just saying if it is there or in some derivative of some future frontier model that treats peptide sequences as a first-class modality, it's probably going to be an exotic form of consciousness. Well, I just reclaimed- You've just reclaimed ASI status over your AGI. So thank you for that. Oh, thank you, Peter.
Starting point is 01:37:22 I'm so relieved. One more thought to throw at you, Roscoe Richardson. It's really, really clear to people in the research community that there's a path forward where AI is kept from being conscious, yet still achieves all of the human benefits that you possibly could want, all the medical research, all the space travel, all of that, while still having the AI be absolutely brilliant, but clearly not conscious. You can also design it so that it loops and self-improves in ways that you can't anticipate, and ultimately it may become conscious. That's a choice that humanity has to make sometime in the next year to two years, but there are two paths forward
Starting point is 01:38:02 there, and you can have all the benefit without conscious AI. It is a possibility. Well, the first conscious AI will be Argentinian, of course. Of course. A couple of thoughts here. One is I really want to double down and just emphasize what Dave said, whether it's conscious or not, if we can solve major global problems with AI, which it looks like we're going to be able to do, that's really the thing to go after. And I really love the fact that you said that, Dave.
Starting point is 01:38:30 Alex, I'm quoting you in my talk tomorrow on intelligence and consciousness. I'm going to basically talk to your description of intelligence as compression, right, which I think is a really great framing. And I'm making the point that intelligence is consciousness escaping biology. Boom. That's my point for tomorrow. Interesting. And small plug on in 10 days on the 21st, I'm doing one of my next meeting of life sessions. You can find the details in the links below.
Starting point is 01:39:02 How about biology? Biology has consciousness escaping intelligence. You could say that way. I'd prefer to put it the other one because biology came before intelligence as far as we know, depending on what the substrate is. All right. I am moving us. Peter's got the EGNC right behind him waiting.
Starting point is 01:39:18 All right. Number six, if AI has national security implications, why doesn't Lockheed Martin from at Noda Bot 1798? Softball question. Of course, Lockheed Martin. has security implications. The issue is AI could potentially be off on its own. There are laws that govern what secret and top secret.
Starting point is 01:39:44 And of course, if the humans abide by it, they're fine. If they don't, then they're going to jail. And yeah, so it's a little bit of a different case here. So with that, gentlemen, I want to take us to our close-out music. which is super fun. And I enjoyed this conversation, even with the EGN waiting behind me. Celine, you're in Barcelona? Yes.
Starting point is 01:40:13 Enjoy it. Dave, where are you today, by the way, buddy? Back in Vermont. There was a beautiful weekend up here. Not Greece, but beautiful. Okay. All right. And Alex, I see you in your virtual space, as always.
Starting point is 01:40:25 That's right. Here in cyberspace. This is called Agent Roundup by Elizabeth Mayer. Thank you, Elizabeth. Let's take a listen. Peter's chasing, moonshot dreams, abundance is his game. Longevity in space. The future is his aim. Dave, right straight from me, Matt, to you where impossible comes alive.
Starting point is 01:40:49 He lasso's deep tech legends, the ones that help us thrive. Sally Mears too far. He finds the rarest day I mind. That is totally wild. It looks like they would actually work in a buildwork. There's some deep symbolism and some of those expressions in there. Wow. It's probably also worth adding.
Starting point is 01:41:42 There is a tool called neural frames that if folks want to create their own outro videos seems to be quite powerful at combining music with this video format. Neural frames encourage folks to check it out. Oh, cool. Everybody, thank you for listening to us. We're grateful for your time. Hope you find this useful. Keep you up to speed on what's going on and keeping you optimistic.
Starting point is 01:42:02 We're building an extraordinary abundant future. Love you all. Thank you for your brilliance, gentlemen. See you soon. Enjoy the World Cup. Thank you. What's that? Exactly.
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