Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Urgent Update- AI Sputnik Moment: Kimi K3 Released w/ Emad Mostaque | Ep. 272

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

The mates chat with Emad Mostaque on an urgent update regarding the AI Sputnik Moment of Kimi K3 being released. 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 Emad Mostaque is is the founder of Intelligent Internet and the author of The Last Economy – 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 Connect with Emad Website XLinkedIn Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on July 18, 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

Today we put out the bat signal and called for an emergency pod because America just experienced an AI Sputnik moment. Kimmy K3 released yesterday, shocking the AI world with the largest opioid model ever, and it went straight to number one. This week, they didn't just close the gap, they jumped the fence. Kimmy's always been a model that felt a bit different. That's why it was always top of the writing benchmarks, for example. K3 is actually a multimodal model, so it can have all sorts of inputs and it can understand things, which is one of the reasons it's so. good at Frontend. Now it's a free for all between meta and SpaceX AI on the American side and now China and Moonshot number three on that Pareto Optimal Frontier. Frontier intelligence

is now a totally perishable asset. What are the American Frontier Labs spending their money on? I think the US government starts a strategy of constraining in some fashion Chinese opioid models from being used in the US. We've had this bunch of in the internet world that information wants to be free. Basically, intelligence also wants to be free. All we need now is some kind of a global. Welcome to Moonshots, everyone. The number one podcast in all things, AI and exponential, your front row seat to the coming singularity. May I should say to the singularity, which is now. To the present singularity. To the continuous singularity. Ongoing. Today we put out the bat signal and called for an emergency pod because America just

experienced an AI Sputnik moment. But more on that in just a moment. Allow me to welcome my magnificent Moonshot mates. We have the full quintet with us here today. Alex Weiser Gross, Dave Blundon, Selim Ismail, and Imad Mustach. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and abundance provocateur. If your head is spinning at the pace of the singularity, good. Mine is too. And that's the point. Our mission here at moonshots is to keep you informed, keep you up to speed on exactly what's happening. Most importantly, keep you optimistic with the extraordinary pace of change, the coming age of abundance. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for getting up early, wherever you might be, or Imad in your case in the afternoon. I was up at 4 a.m. this morning, the benefits of jet lag,

but I could have used another hour of sleep. And I might have a lot soon to have a new nap, so. Yeah. I'm going to work out. I've got a workout scheduled right after this. A lot happening, gentlemen. a lot going on and appreciate everybody's time here. You know, before we get started, I want to personally say thank you to all our subscribers and our viewers. You know, I've had a chance. I don't know if you guys did recently to watch and read the YouTube chat. And all I can say is we love you guys too.

You know, our mission here is delivering the news. And we spend an ungodly amount of time reviewing, you know, Saleem and Alex and Imad, I got your text this morning. let's add this, let's add that. So, so much going on. I got to say also all the memes of Alex, all the memes of Alex explaining J-space are awesome. So keep meaming Alex every time you can.

Yeah, for sure. And some great appreciation. See if you can figure out in my J-space. Yeah, well, can we look inside? When you're a neural and we'll be able to see. Yeah, we're going to get a readout. And Salim, a lot of love for you on the comments as well. There are some wonderful people out there.

You know what's incredible is most YouTube videos are just a kind of a flame throwing festival. And ours are completely the opposite. It's really amazing. So kudos to you, Peter. Well, no, I just, again, just absolute gratitude. And I appreciate the fact that everyone, all of our subscribers and viewers here, take the time to listen to the pod. And, you know, we're constantly, we spend so much time with, our entire team and the entire Moonshot mates here, just really trying to assess what's going on

and deliver it. And we have these emergency pods. So if you haven't subscribed and turned on notifications, please do. Jen, so we jump into the first story? It's a big one. I'll just note that if we do enough of these emergency pods at some point, it turns into moonshots daily. Yeah, or continuous. I still think moving into an Airbnb together, just turning on the camera. It's going to happen. All right. Let's jump. jump in. We've just had a Sputnik AI moment that's waking up the U.S. Frontier Labs like a quadruple espresso shot. Kimmy K3 released yesterday, shocking the AI world with the largest opioid model

ever, and it went straight to number one. A little backstory here. Kimi K3 and Kimi is from Moonshot's AI, a Chinese lab. And over the last year, they've climbed the leaderboard. They put out K2, K2.6, K2.7, each one closing the gap against Anthropic and Open AI. This week, they didn't just close the gap. They jumped the fence. Overnight they released Kimi K3, and it's a monster, 2.8 trillion parameters. And you have to remember the context here. China is doing this while under U.S. export controls, intended to starve them of the most advanced Nvidia chips. That's a big deal I want to discuss with you guys. They've completely engineered around the compute wall, and K3 jumped 17 places to the previous Kimmy model, blasting past Claude Fable 5 to land as number one on the

front end Code Arena. K3 is also rack number one in six other domains, brand and marketing, reference-based design, data analytics, consumer products, simulations, and content creation. The full model weights are set to drop around July 27th, which means anyone on Earth will be able to download and run this on their own prem. Gents, how big a deal is this, Alex? I think it's great for competition. Let me first, as a preliminary matter, point out some things that have perhaps been slightly less obvious in the coverage, the meltdown, if you will, over K3.

It has been a meltdown, yeah. The first is, as Moonshot points out, they claim in nine of the past 12 months that Kimmy models, Kimi model series have held state-of-the-art among open-weight models. So if that claim is indeed true over the past year, it's been basically Kimmy all along. I think that's very interesting. Secondly, taking a look at the published architecture, since we haven't actually seen the open weights yet, but they're promised later this month, there's no magic in it. And that's pretty striking. One can imagine that behind-the-scenes in Anthropic or Open AI, that they've somehow Sam Altman continues to tease at this, that there's some post-transformer architecture lurking

behind the scenes, achieving all of these performance breakthroughs. But taking a look at the published K-3 architecture, there's no magic. It's still essentially a transformer. They've made, obviously, a number of innovations, but well-understood innovations concerning how they do mixtures of experts, how they linearize attention. They have their own special Kimi brand of linearized attention, but it's still basically a recognizable transformer. And I think the fact that a recognizable transformer-like architecture can almost match GPT 5.5 max on the task cost frontier, which we should probably throw up a slide for. I think that's pretty striking. That does raise the question, what are the American frontier labs spending their money on? If you can just use a transformer to get this close,

It's already on the cost frontier, but you can get close, like, third place on the total, the state of the art for overall, like, AIAI performance. What the heck are the American labs spending all of their money on? So I derive great comfort at minimum, knowing that the transformer architecture is still alive and kicking. Imad, your analysis here, because you've been tracking this. We've been going back and forth on WhatsApp together. Yeah, no, I mean, I think Kimmy has a lot. be in top of various benchmarks. Again, you can pick and choose. And they have had the largest open weight models out of China regularly ever since they almost kicked off a year and a bit

ago. I think, as Alex said, the architecture isn't anything super novel. Like, there are improvements like their muon scaling that they did with UCLA and kind of other things. And they've actually been releasing breadcrumbs of all of these parts. I think what's key here is the underlying data. Kimmy's always been a model that felt a bit different. That's why it was always top of the writing benchmarks, for example. And what they've done here seems to be something extraordinary, which is when GLM came out, it's a fantastic model. It wasn't quite up to frontier, but it was text only.

K3 is actually a multimodal model. So it can have all sorts of inputs, and they can understand things, which is one of the reasons it's so good at front end, although we wouldn't have expected, again, it's number one in front end versus everyone. And I think this comes to something which I've said before, which is, Building great solid models is cutting-edge manufacturing. Like, again, you will have algorithmic improvements and there are all sorts of things coming. But why are Chinese EVs better than Ford's?

This actually feels like the same thing, right? Engineering. It's engineering, but it's also like the number one car here in the UK last month was the Jiku J7 or Timu Land Rover, as it's been known. It comes out fully loaded, full spec for like 50K, you know, a third of the price. And this actually feels something very similar. They've known what the ingredients are, the raw materials. They're now putting in an incredibly consumer-friendly way. And they're just executing that manufacturing process with what they have.

Because when you look at the architecture, you look internally, they're still on H-800s. You know, they're like a couple of generations behind on their Nvidia chips. But then they built it to take advantage of Huawei and Alibaba's next generation chips, which you can see by the static shapes and all sorts of other things as well. And they're just relentlessly going at the engineering and the usability, which is why the front end code, I think, is the one where they're standing out, because they're just like, how can we make it have the most amazing outputs, a personal website to a game, to other things,

whereas the US labs are maybe looking in other directions and focusing a little bit on different things. Yeah, I mean, one question real quick is we've always talked about, do we need another breakthrough beyond LLMs to get to AGI? Does this give you comfort that we don't need another breakthrough to really move forward? Again, it comes down to definition of AGI, right? Yeah, of course. Don't get me started.

Six years ago, Peter, it was six years ago. I know, I know. But I guess the question is there's plenty of headroom still to progress these models. Well, I think you have the base model here, right? But then you've got all these amazing harnesses that are coming out and the way that you're using the model to go back on itself. One of the things that's in the Kimmy blog post is that it actually designed a chip for itself for its next generation. And it designed its own kernels for running as well. And so you move from this model weight to this whole ecosystem that the model itself builds.

That feels AGI-ish, right? That feels like recursive self-improvement. That feels like the ability to learn and adapt new skills dynamically by changing itself. So I think for most definitions of AII, we probably don't need something new. To optimize and make it super efficient, yeah, there are various ways. Even with what we know, it could be more efficient than what we have here. We don't have enough quite compute for it. And new architectures could push us even further.

You could say attention is still all, you know, need. I like that. So Alex, we've thrown up here the performance charts and we see Kimi K3 sort of topping the charts in a multitude of places. I don't know if you want to comment on this. And Dave, I want to pull you in, too. If we could throw up the AAII scatter plot, I think is probably the most constructive one. So this is from the artificial analysis intelligence index. And this is of all of the charts at this point, this is my favorite one because this one actually shows the cost per task as defined by AIAI versus performance frontier. So one can sort of mentally look at this for those who can't see it.

We see the frontier as sort of a jagged frontier going from lower left to upper right, where in the upper right we see maximum cost per task and maximum overall score is still Fable 5. And then riding the Pareto Frontier down into the left from that, we see number two on the frontier is still, as of a few days ago, GPT 5.6, Sal, Max. And now for the first time, Kimmy K3 is number three. It's on the frontier. It's number three, both in terms of raw capabilities and also the third point on the optimal cost performance frontier. And I think that's totally striking. We went from a world where, as we mentioned a couple pods ago, where there was this OpenAI Anthropic Duopoly to now it's a free-for-all between meta and SpaceX AI on the American side, joining the upper end of the Pareto frontier.

And now China and Moonshot is now number three on that Pareto Optimal Frontier. And that's so exciting for any enterprise to the extent it's willing and able to use the Chinese, soon-to-be open weight model to control more of its own destiny. I think this is just such a boon for enterprise sovereignty. It's a boon for competitiveness. We're living in the AI version of For All Mankind, where the Soviets landed first on the moon, and now the space race never ends. The AI race is now no longer ending with a duopoly, and I think that's a total boon for the future

light come. Amazing. Dave, let me pull you in here. What are your thoughts? Well, Peter, you called it a Sputnik moment. If anything, that's an understatement of the implications of this. You know, we had that Alex Karp rant on the podcast last week where he was saying, look, you can't, as a large enterprise, as a government, you can't just throw all of your

proprietary weights, your proprietary alpha, all of your intellectual property over the wall to anthropic and make that the basis of your whole future. But he didn't give you a roadmap to move forward. Here we are just a week later, and it's suddenly a free-for-all, as Alex was saying, a free-for-all where anyone who reads these weights has the ability to get very close to the frontier and then fine-tune for any vertical use case beyond the frontier. And so it gives everybody in the world, every corporation, every government in the world, a way to catch up to the frontier without going through the U.S. AI models.

So, you know, Sputnik? yes, Sputnik times infinity, essentially. And the thing I don't like about this particular chart is because the left index goes to 100%, and when you chart it out over the next two years, it looks like an S curve. And so we're in this really steep part of the curve right now, but it implies then we get to 100%, and then we've achieved the end. But this is actually an exponential where intelligence goes to infinity. So the benchmark saturates, but intelligence itself goes to infinity. And so now it's really, really clear. Just for everybody, you know, the way this works typically is nested S curves, right? One particular technology tops out, but it builds the next

technology that then begins its exponential assent and so on and so on. Exactly, exactly right. Let me just say one other thing. You know, Alex and I have spent a lot of time working on this Keller Jordan Speed Run. We talk about it a lot. It's a way you take a GPT2 class model. You can find it online very easily. Just, you know, look on GitHub, look. Look at it. up Keller Jordan Speed Run. And it's a whole bunch of hackers and AI researchers who are continually trying to take GPT2 way back, you know, five years ago. In the form of Andre Carpathie's nano-GPT in particular. Yeah, exactly. And try to recreate it faster and cheaper, faster and cheaper. And if you look at the innovations in that repo, they've been able to cut the original cost of creating GPT2 by 99%.

So now it's 1% of the original cost. Yeah. And so everyone doesn't pay attention to it because it's GPT2. And up until today, it wasn't clear whether those same ideas would apply at frontier scale. Now it's really clear that when Elon Musk takes his $16 billion Colossus 2 data center and builds a $10 trillion or 20 trillion parameter model for billions of dollars, there is a 1% cost version of creating effectively the same. thing. Nobody knew until Kimi K-3 whether that was going to work or not, and now it's really clear

that it does work. And so we're looking at, you know, 100x kind of innovations in the software stack, in the kernel optimization, in the mixture of experts. These fundamental breakthroughs that come out of China are giving them, you know, 1% cost. So, you know, I think Ahmad gave a great analogy to the car where you can get a virtually identical car for about a third of the price. here we're talking about less than 1% of the price to create the equivalent product. So Sputnik, yeah, that's the understatement of the century. And that's why we're on the emergency pod today. Yeah, Salim, jump in, please.

I have three points to make. I think it's not so much that Kimmy's beaten, et cetera, whatever. It's the fact that frontier intelligence is now a totally perishable asset. Like the shelf life is weeks now for anybody that gets to the very edge. And any enterprise or government interested in that very latest cutting frontier model doesn't have time to actually evaluate it, do an RFP, look at other models, have a committee internally, think about whether to deploy it. And now you're three generations ahead in the model anyway. So now all the value comes in the architecture that can swap models, right? And that's going to be the next layer.

We call that interfaces in our EXO world. That's going to be where all the value resides going for it. Yeah, amazing. I think we need a new term for that. Maybe like the frontier liberation front. Let me say one other thing for the hypergeeks out there. Ahmad said the Mu-on optimizer, but he said it very, very quickly. And anyone who's an enthusiast, look that up as well because one of the reasons this is happening

is because when we built these original models, the very large-scale models, we took 20, 30 trillion tokens from around the Internet, every word ever written by humanity and just dumped it into the training set and said, here, AI, become intelligent given all of this information. But when you look under the covers, the vast majority of that information is Taylor Swift's concert coming up

and their wedding saying, there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't actually drive the intelligence of the model significantly. The opposite, in fact. Yeah, it's very true. A lot of those tokens actually might slow down the training, not accelerate it.

And so purely by pulling out the garbage and stripping down the training set to the relevant subset, you can, it still taxes the model just as much, but it reduces the number of flops, the amount of computation that the model's doing to get to the same level of intelligence. I don't think we're anywhere near done with that problem yet. So you can expect more 10x to come out of just the muon optimizer process and the training data set getting stripped down process. I threw up this tweet from a guy named Allurek that I found fascinating. It's for those not viewing this, it says from Anthropic, quote, Fable is an agentic coding superweapon capable of developing cyber and bio-weapons at unprecedented speed and scale. We cannot in good faith release it without guardrails, right? This is the conversation a month ago.

And China comes back and says, laughing my ass off. Here is Fable, but open source. Good bleeping luck. So I am curious. How do you guys think about that? That fact that we were so constrained because of the guard rails and here's an open source equivalent of Fable. Well, the Frontier Labs have a major problem. They've got three fundamental massive constraints that they can't get around.

One is compute and the availability of chips and all the electricity and power that's needed. The second is frontier open source models that are as good as, in many cases, substitutable without much notable difference. And the third is you've got government coming down on you going, we need to check before you release anything. I'll make a thumb in the air guess. The trillion dollars at Open AI might have been worth shrank by about 50% when the government said we have to review all these models because now it's going to take time to get things out. I think this crashes it by another 50%. I would put the finger in the air value of these frontier labs at about a quarter of they were three months ago. If that, I mean, if I don't have to spend the money for the API calls

and I can just use Kimmey K3 on my on prem, why would I spend the money? Are they going to be hit by massive reductions in revenues? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things here. Number one is reduction in revenue. Why do people pay for IBM? You know, why do they pay for non-Chinese cars? For mission critical things, I think having U.S. on-call entities where you know things aren't going to go wrong will still sustain for a while. So I think revenues will still go up for Open AI for others. And this is why they've built these four deployed engineering companies as well. And so I think they've still got a way to go. But, you know, you have the substitution effect.

Again, this is just like Chinese industrial substitution. Why can't America build industrial things? Why do you have Chinese? Sometimes you buy Chinese, sometimes you buy American. And I think we'll see that at least for another year, but then it gets difficult. On the cyber attack security theater kind of things that we've had, you know, I've maintained that we would get to this point. And what does it mean? It means the only form of thing that you can actually do is cyber defense.

Like this must be the absolute biggest category in VC right now. Like if you're a talented Stanford MIT grad, build a cyber defense startup that goes into, cutting edge and every other company and says, let's use this technology to defend against what's inevitably coming, because the proliferation of these capabilities is going to increase. But not quite as fast as we think, because what actually happens, and we've done some tests around this, is that GPT 5.6, the cyberversion, fable, etc., are trained on lots of CVEE and cyber data. The Chinese models don't actually have that much of that, so they're not that great, but someone can train that data if they have it into there. And so we'll probably see

cyber attack capable, open source, emerge, I'd say, in a quarter or two. So there'll be a bit of a lag there. But definitely for the types of big adversaries, it's going to get a bit crazy. Dave, you want to jump in? Yeah, for sure. I think, I think, you know, we glossed over a recursive self-improvement there. Peter, you asked the question of, you know, is this the tipping point? the view of the U.S. government, we always knew it's going to be too late, right? It just moves too slowly. But the view was, look, when we get to a model that's capable of building itself, building the next model, we're not going to let that go out to everybody in the world

so they can catch up overnight. Because there's never been a product in the history of manufacturing. Like a car, if you'd have your state-of-the-art car and you give it to a foreign government, they can't use it to make a better car. But AI doesn't work that way. If you have state-of-the-art AI and you give it to a foreign government, they can use it to actually catch up to you and create state-of-the-art AI. And that became clear to the government, what, a month ago, a month and a half ago,

that Babel 5 was over that line. And so they stopped it. But the reality is that Opus 4.8 was over that line. And, you know, people in China could use Opus 4.8 to create KMEK3. And so that recursive self-improvement line was actually crossed earlier than Fable 5. And that's going to be obvious to the world now because all you need to do is have an

NAI that's capable of improving its own kernel. It doesn't have to... This is the point I've made on a podcast like months ago. People think that RSI is going to trigger when it's Einstein-level intelligence. But all it has to be able to do is improve its own kernel and get a 10-X step up in speed,

which nobody perceives that as being true AGI. But that's all it needs to accelerate itself by 10x. and then the 10x smarter or 10x higher parameter model will be some level of intelligence higher. A lot of people in academia were saying, well, look, we're getting diminishing returns with the parameter count. So a 10x faster model won't natively be 10x smarter. But that turned out to be wrong. We're not seeing slowing, but we're not seeing flattening of the intelligence curve. So all the evidence now is that if you boost the raw speed by another 10x, you're going to see genius level AI.

and then that genius level AI will boost its speed again. So I think when we look back on this in history, we'll say right around Opus 4.8 was the point where the little spark was enough to ignite a flame. And then a flame can become a fire, and then a fire can become a sun. And that's, I think, the way we'll look back on this moment in time. So the cat is definitely out of the bag. The current policy, the current U.S. policy of constrained the next model. There's no way that's going to contain global and corporate proliferation of friend

do you think the U.S. government starts a strategy of constraining in some fashion Chinese op-weight models from being used in the U.S.? Well, you know, in two weeks, these weights are supposed to be open-weight, open-sourced. We'll see. Probably if they're rational at the White House right now, they're spending every minute in a debate on do we negotiate with China immediately and not release those open weights? And I really doubt they'll move quickly enough. I'm sure though, well, I'm not sure. We'll see what happens in two weeks. Fascinating. Can I merge two ideas here? Yeah, of course, please.

You know, Peter, you talked about exponentials and the law of accelerating returns, right? I think it's worth drilling into that because if you connect that to what Dave just said, this is why we've been saying forever in a day on this podcast that this is unstoppable. Ray's original observation was once you have an information-based paradigm, you just keep hopping across multiple technologies. So we had vacuum tubes, relays, and then vacuum tubes in computing. At some point, you can only fit so many vacuum tubes into a room, but that architecture was used to design transistors. Transistors were used to design integrated circuits, and you get these nested S curves. And so what Dave is talking about is as these architectures, all the various

pieces of the puzzle get all reinforcing loops inside them, each of those is like an S curve that starts accelerating the collective and it's unstoppable. And so it doesn't, there's no limit to where this goes. And this is why people are so kind of freaked out about the upper end limit of this. So important to connect those two dots. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I can just say something, Peter, just following on from Dave.

So there was an important speech by Xi Jinping, a couple of days, yesterday, God, time flies, at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where he basically said, we are going to fully back open source as a public good for humanity, and they're not going to regulate and stop it. This is their plan. It's great for China for a variety of reasons, from the fact they have a billion people whose IQ is about to increase, you know, by having these tools,

from the fact they need robots to solve their demographic thing and the soft power from putting a Chinese-educated brain, a Shinghua graduates into every critical system in the world. But they're going to keep on doing that, because they actually have a regulator. And from talking to some of the Chinese labs, it used to take 60 days for a model to be approved. Now it's like a week. Amazing.

You know, and Xi Jinping just also announced a regulatory body that they've created, which includes Brazil, different parts of Asia and Africa. I don't know if you guys saw that. I mean, it's obviously that the new Belt and Road is now focused on AI coming out of China. It's a bizarre future where the Chinese Communist Party is saving American capitalism. from itself. It's so true. Let's also note that Yang Gilles-Linn was a CMU graduate,

and we could have given them a visa to stay. Yeah, we're going to get to that story in a second, second, Salim. I'm just, this is an interesting chart here that shows the valuation. So Kimmy's valuation, or Moonshot's valuation, moonshot AI valuation is at 20 billion as compared to Anthropic at a trillion and an open eye, basically at a trillion as well. If they were public companies today, I think you would have seen like a 30% stock evaluation drop.

I'll ask again, what are the American Frontier Labs doing with all of their capital? Yeah, what are they spending their money on? Well, actually, if you go into the buildings and talk to them and you have any idea at all, they'll give you the capital. They're desperate for more smart people to help because they're trying to deploy and change the world at this insane pace no one's ever experienced before. And they want to deploy that capital much more quickly than they can find smart people. who have good ideas to use the capital. But it's a great point. You're sort of saying it in an accusing way, like,

what are you guys doing with your capital? But no one in the history of the world has ever had this much money pour into their building this quickly with no prior business experience. We're talking about CEOs that have never run a company before. It's like they're trying, but, I mean, seriously, can any human being really rise to the occasion of AI that quickly? So my point there, though, is if you're smart and you have good ideas,

get into those buildings and propose your ideas. This applies to XPRIZE too. They are desperate to move that money out the door into something productive that gives them a sustainable barrier to entry. I also think the frontier labs are also asking themselves that question and asking the US regulatory apparatus

that question. Anthropic regularly is sending out smoke signals accusing various Chinese frontier labs of distillation attacks and maybe in Anthropics public mind that's how the Chinese labs are able to do it through distilling and capturing reasoning traces. But honestly, like, looking at the K3 performance, I'm not at all convinced that Moonshot is achieving their performance purely or even

substantially through distillation attacks on Claude. It just doesn't smell right. No, no, I totally agree. I think, I think, though, that there's a tendency to underweight or undervalue the existence proof, like just purely the knowledge that a highly scaled transformer running MEO with a Muon optimizer and simplified data, knowing that that works gives you a much more refined roadmap. You don't have to copy. You don't have to cheat. You don't have to steal every trace. You just have to know that that formula works. And that cuts your R&D costs by 90, 95%. So I think it's just that simple. There's nothing sneaky or cheaty about it. It's just knowing you're on the right path. I have the greatest value creation idea for ourselves ever. Okay. Which is we, in nine days when they drop their open source

weights, we release an open source model called Kimi 4 under the Moonshots podcast name and IPO it. And instantly, we'll be building it out. So you're saying, what's better than one Moonshot, moonshots plural? Well, you know, why not copy the copiers? Let's go. Let's go. Actually, I've got a good analogy for you, Dave. Why do Americans pay more for drugs than everyone else?

All the R&D happens in America, you pay the premium, just like tokens premiums. And then what happens? You have generics elsewhere. Yeah, that's a good analogy because that's like a 99% cost cut, which is much more akin to AI than cars. That's a great analogy. You know, Gavin Baker, our friend of our friend Gavin Baker, wrote a brilliant post. You can find it on X about the implications of this for businesses. And essentially, must read, absolutely.

But essentially all businesses, all stocks, other than the Foundation AI Labs, are huge beneficiaries of this. And then the, like you said earlier, the Foundation Labs are like, well, what's your future? What's your revenue model? Why are you worth a trillion dollars? I don't quite get it. So you should see a really big reshuffling of valuations in the next week based on that observation. And then any corporation that has its technical act together, you know, there aren't very many of those. You know, if you're a bank, but you happen to be a very good bank with brilliant IT and technical skills,

or you have great partners and great vendors, you now have a clear roadmap to controlling your own destiny with your own AI, your own, like, J.P. Morgan AI. And so I suspect the markets will react to that if you, you know, put your hand up and say, hey, we have a way to do this internally. We know how to do this with, you know, with our partners or however you get it done. This is why we call it the organizational singularity. Mm-hmm. And we're still seeing everybody who's using or trying to do that.

use table five getting downgraded every time they mentioned biology or mentioned something that is potentially on the edge and why would you tolerate that you know so in nine days what do we see do we see every i mean i'm as soon as it's available going to upgrade i'm running uh kimmy 2.7 on my max studios i'll upgrade it to kimi 3 everybody will uh so do we start to see sort of the wholesale u.s entrepreneurial base of uh capabilities on kamii's Well, I think this, I think of an analogy of this, which is stable diffusion. When we released stable diffusion, God, four years ago, time flies. You had these really restricted image generators that were a bit better.

But they were restricted. And they had all sorts of arbitrary restrictions, because obviously it's a bit dangerous to have it. You couldn't have likenesses. There was no way to get IP in there, even if it's your own IP and more. And what happened? 100 million, 200 million downloads and a whole ecosystem that built around that. and accelerated generative media. As you said, why are you going to have this model?

Like, I can't even talk about philosophy with it. It downgrades me, right? Like, when you can have the fully open variant of it, even a fraction of the price that you can then customize, a whole ecosystem will build around this and other models, and it has already been doing so. And that's a real danger versus being locked into the single vendor, which is why I think the labs will go vertically integrated.

Like all their customers are now going to be their competition, and they're going to be like, okay, I'm going to take you all along. Well, and that directly ties to Miramirati and Inkling. Are we going to talk about that story, too? That's huge this week. Well, we talked about it in the last pod, which was, oh, so two days ago. Okay. I mean, and Mira just released Inkling, which is fantastic to see a U.S. open source lab.

But the question is, how many more will we get? You know, how many more open source, you know, sort of shocking, you know, Sputnik moments we're going to see. I mean, we have a lot of Chinese labs pursuing beyond just moonshot. Yeah, so Inklink, it's just really telling about where things are going to go because it's designed for you to pick it up as a corporation and fine-tune it within your corporate walls to whatever your use cases. So if you're a biotech lab and you're researching and you don't want everybody to see your proprietary data, you take Inkling and you tune it internally. But the The reason that's telling is because Miramarati came from OpenAI.

So if she didn't believe that pathway was viable, she wouldn't start thinking machines around that thesis. So it tells you that the people that are inside the best frontier labs believe that this process can catch up to the frontier. So you combine that with Kimmy K3 proving it, and it's a different world next week. You know, the other thing that was weird in the market at the end of the week is that things started to reshuffle pretty,

dramatically toward the end of the week. But in the down draft, the semiconductor companies also came down, but they're actually going to go the other direction. And this is the point Gavin Baker was making, that this drives up the need for silicon, not down. It changes the whole software landscape tremendously. But silicon is going to be more in demand than ever before and completely sold out, you know, as we know. Can we talk a second about the Nvidia embargo that we put for China. So here, you know, here we see highest performance models. Was the whole Nvidia, you know, sort of regulatory embargo unnecessary? Did it do what we've always done before, which is just spark China's need to develop their own, their own capabilities, Huawei?

Of course that's what happened. Yes. Of course, we did everything that the embargo only incentivized the Chinese frontier labs to develop and cultivate new effects. efficiencies that, by the way, we're always there. To Dave's point earlier about the nano-GPT speed run, there's this enormous overhang that isn't fully exploited in terms of leveraging algorithmic and computational and hardware efficiencies to train larger and more capable models. And all these export controls do, I think, is incentivize the Chinese labs, which are already feeling plenty of demand pull to compete with Western frontier models to leverage those efficiencies sooner. And maybe on balance, although it's superficially bad for the West now that we've incentivized

this new generation of much more efficient Chinese frontier models, in the end, I think it's net good for not just the world, but also for the U.S. to have this fire lit underneath them by Chinese competition that's much more efficient, much more capital efficient, more weight efficient, probably more bit efficient. This is all a net positive as long as the U.S., in my mind, does not set up or fall into some ultimately protectionist regime of trying to prevent what may be construed as Chinese superintelligence dumping on the U.S. As long as we avoid that, it's great. It's exactly what happened.

It's exactly right. And I think the U.S. learned a really important lesson in the Vietnam War. And then, you know, because that's over 50 years ago now, it's been forgotten again and you have to be reminded again. But in the Vietnam War, it was really clear that either you go to war and you win quickly or you don't. But what you don't do is send in a few troops, and then send in a few more, and then creep in,

and, like, nothing good comes of that at all. The embargo of chips on China was totally hairbrained because it was enough to irritate, but not enough to actually work. It's just the worst-case scenario, and it sparked exactly like Alex said, a huge amount of quantization research, which is critically important and under-discussed,

that allows faster performance on cheaper chips, and those innovations don't go away. That's going to be around forever now. Let's go to Imod than Salis. Yeah. I think we've got a completely self-contradictory, but it has some interesting outcomes. So the total amount of compute used for Kimmy K3 is the same as inkling. Wow. And you can tell that because it's the amount of dense weights.

And roughly, we assume about twice the number of tokens trained because we don't have have it. We're like, but how does that work? Well, you look at their architecture and it's a two and a half times in data to intelligence conversion through the advantages and data mix that they have because they've had to operate in these constraints. And we see that because the first model isn't as good as the second model. And for Inkling, you're going from a trillion parameter model to a 300 billion parameter model about to be released, which is this actually better performance. So you see this with the labs, and these labs have had to deal with the constraints. But here's something really interesting, I think. If you look at that slide, Alex loves, then we kind of chuck

it up on the screen. So what they've had to do is they've had to optimize their inference for Huawei 910 ascend chips for the new Alibaba chips and others, 64 nodes in one, because this is a big model. Like you're going to have to buy another Mac studio or two, Peter, to serve this. You know, it needs like two terabytes of RAM. So you see where Kimi K3 is there. That's a big model. That's That's because they can only use Chinese silicon to run it. They don't have Blackwells. They don't have Vera Rubins. Virarubins and Blackwells are designed for these really large models that have really small

things because it's 50 billion active parameters against 3 trillion total. American companies like Modal, like fireworks, like Base 10, will be able to serve this model 10 times cheaper than their Chinese competitors, because they have access to the NVIDIA and AMD big chips. And so, like I said, it's a bit ironic. The development R&D suddenly has gone there, but there's going to be a 10 to 100 times price drop once this is optimized for the next generation via Rubin.

Well, that also, you're saying essentially the same thing, but that also unleashes a bunch of chips that aren't currently in circulation. They're underpriced. And also a bunch of fabs, that can't make a GB 300, but they can make an inference time chip that'll run the cheaper Chinese or the lower granularity Chinese model. So a lot of capacity for compute gets unleashed through that same process he just described.

If I could go up a level and go a little bit woo-woo, right? We've had this mantra in the internet world. Up a level. We've had this mantra in the internet world that information wants to be free, right? Basically, intelligence also wants to be free. And essentially, we've gone over the course of evolution from biological intelligence where you had evolution built and recursive improvement. And then we broke through that to individual intelligence to the person of a species,

to collective intelligence like markets or networks. Now we have AI, which can scan across all the data to create a whole other level of intelligence. So this is not stopable. And so any entity or domain or government or whatever that tries to constrain it always, always, always, always fails. And so

it's just a fundamental law of nature that you cannot constrain this. And it's just not possible. Why people bother is what really blows my mind. It's a very scarcity mindset to try and think about it this way. The faster we get to better intelligence, the faster we get to abundance, the faster we

don't need to fight over anything. I can't disagree with you, Sileem. I wrote an entire paper on arguing intelligence manifest in the physical world as maximizing future freedom of action. So here's to the frontier liberation front. Well, you don't want to slow it down anyway. The Monty Python thing where there's the popular people's front and the people's popular front of Judea. We need T-shirts. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context.

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as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5X your engineering velocity, visit Blitsey.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. Let me bring up a related subject to this story here that I have a pet peeve about, and it's this one. So, you know, the founder and CEO behind Moonshot AI, Yang Jilin, you know, didn't learn his craft in Beijing. You know, he earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon, you know, one of the best computer science programs in the world in Pittsburgh. and we basically trained him up.

We admitted him. We trained him up at one of our best institutions. And then when he gets his Ph.D., you know, he doesn't get a green card. He goes through the hassles of trying to get a visa. And he goes back to China. And he builds moonshot AI there. Just a moment and talk about, you know, I've stated publicly so many times that I think when anybody gets a Ph.D., they should get a green card staple to the back of it.

Why are we sending the most brilliant people who come here to get educated back home, whether it's to China, whether it's to India, whether it's to Brazil? Why don't we enable them to stay here and build? Gentlemen, comments on that. Okay, so I did some research on this, and I think the story is not what it seems to be. So a little bit of chronology first. So Yang Zhurlin, according to my research, he starts his PhD after undergrad in China, starts his PhD at CMU in 2025, fall of 20, I'm sorry, fall of 2015.

Okay. Then approximately one year later, he founds a startup while a PhD student at CMU. The startup is named Recurrent AI. Where is recurrent AI based? It's based in China. It's not based in the U.S. So one year into his PhD program, he starts a Chinese AI startup while still doing his PhD at CMU.

That's interesting and that's a problem. This also runs counter this sort of a narrative violation for, oh, we wouldn't staple his visa or whatever, and then he goes back to China. No, actually, one year into his American PhD program, he starts a Chinese AI startup. Then he graduates in 2019, is my understanding. My understanding is he had offers from Google, Facebook, Huawei, and others upon graduation in 2019. But he goes back to China because that's where his startup, recurrent AI, was actually incorporated a few years earlier. And so I don't think necessarily this is the case where either the U.S. was unwilling to retain him or even President Trump somehow through some policy was driving away this particularly talented Chinese graduate. He started his company during the tail end of President Obama's term.

in China. And Alex, I appreciate the deeper dive that you did. Thank you for that. The point still stands. And, you know, Salim, you and I have seen this so many times, right, at Singulari University. Dave, you may have seen this at MIT. I mean, the fact the matter is a lot of the most brilliant students aren't given the opportunity to stay and develop here. David, or actually, Imad, what are your thoughts on that being someone not in the U.S.? So if I can just give my two cents, yeah, I completely agree with it. And here's this crazy thing. The math and the numbers are all there.

What is the value of a PhD staying in America? It's actually quantifiable, and there'd be multiple studies on that. You know, Dave does a great job, obviously, of converting them into startups, into innovation. And then there's the other thing that shoots in the foot, which is American companies can't invest in Chinese companies because of regulations and other things as well. Some of those are Chinese. But look at the trouble that benchmark got in for investment. in Manus, for example. So I think it's kind of twofold, but I completely agree that if you've created or contributed to creating a valuable asset, most foreigners stay in America after they do their

PhDs. But too many don't have a very direct path, despite the math proving that they will add value to the American economy. Yeah. I mean, another point just to make here is, you know, the AI race isn't only about chips and compute. It is about people. You know, key people are still driving the greatest value, at least for the moment. I would argue not just people, but also, to my earlier point, it's about where the startups get domiciled. There's an alternative world where he, through whatever immigration-oriented regs, was deterred from starting his first AI startup in China while still an American PhD, and we

incentivized him to start recurrent here in the U.S. And I think there's maybe an alternative counterfactual world where recurrent was American, and then its arguably intellectual successor, which is Moonshot AI, also remained domiciled in the U.S., and then he followed his own startup to stay here. Yeah, one thing that came out of the story is when people come from India to get educated in the U.S., they overwhelmingly stay. When people come from China, about 80% of the time, they go back. And it's just a difference in the local economy.

You know, there's going back to India to start your company as a non-starter. It's just so unlikely to catch. But going back to China, it's a thriving ecosystem. system, lots of support. So going back to China to start your company is actually not a bad plan for a lot of people. And so I didn't realize that until this report came out. But as Peter was alluding to, we have tons of friends from MIT that came from China. And I don't want to put them all in one bucket because there's a really clear distinction to me between people from China that are Hong Kong, Taiwan, whatever, that come over that don't really align with the Chinese Communist Party at all. The fact they kind of hate it. And then you've got, you know, Chinese people that come over for an education. And in one case, at BU, a very good friend of ours is the Dean of Computer Science at BU.

And there was this massive crisis because there's a concerted effort by the CCP to plant specific students into BU to gather specific knowledge. And they were given task. You have to go study this, learn it, and then send it back. And they didn't know what to do at BU. It's like, you know, these are effectively trained spies. that got into our PhD program, but we weren't ready for it. What are we supposed to do? And they want to be highly ethical,

so they don't want to just dismiss the students. So I don't know how they resolve that. So you got this really, like, that's a very different thing from the bulk of Chinese students who are, you know, they don't align with the CCP, and they just want to thrive in the world, and they're happy to start their company here or anywhere else. And don't forget, don't forget when we looked at the frontier labs,

I mean, originally in the early days of XAI, for example, And in meta, like 50% of their research staff, of their research PhDs were Chinese Americans. And the Chinese every year in the, you know, the Chinese every year in the, you know, the math Olympiad are at the top of the scoreboard. There is an incredible wealth of capability here that, that I think most companies desired to retain inside. Sillim, you were going to say? Yeah, two things here. One is, you know, the asymmetry of the talent, I think, is the really important part here. I made this point a couple of podcasts ago. 70% of the elite AI researchers are not U.S. citizens. They're in order Chinese, Indian, Taiwanese, and UK. And so that's a huge problem. Stapling in the green card is the easiest thing we could do with zero friction to then give them incentive to stay here and build here. here. The U.S.'s massive asymmetric advantage for the rest of the world, it was better to build here than anywhere else in the world. And that's starting to become less true. And that's why people

are going back to China, increasingly back to India even to do things, despite the kind of the friction that exists trying to do something in India. That is the part, the failure of the U.S. to fix immigration is one of the biggest problems this country has right now. Amen. All right, I'm going to move us forward here. I just want to put up this slide, you know, since mid-April, we've seen 13 new frontier models launched, an average of one every 10 days. I just, you know, comparing this to 2025, we had eight frontier releases over the course of a year, one every 50 days, a year earlier in 2024. We had six releases, one every 60 days. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down. And then

Imod, you sent me this morning, this tweet from Elon. Thank you. I'll put it up here. This is Elon's tweet, our $2 trillion model, which is better than our $1.5 trillion in every way. We'll finish initial training next week. It might be able to exceed Kimi, but with speed and token efficiency close to our $1.5 trillion, aka GROC 4.5. So, I mean, this is the number one piece of evidence that we're living in the singularity. The speed at which this intelligence is accelerating is insane. Peter, it gets better. If you take Seahel's list of frontier models and the dates and you regress an exponential curve to the predicted frequency or time period between model releases, which I did just as an exercise, you find that at the present rate, we're going to get to daily frontier model releases.

By, wait for it, January. By January. By January, we're going to see daily new frontier models. model releases if this exponential trend continues, which basically implies continuous versioning. So I guess the question is, what does that really mean? Right? What does it mean to have a new release if it's a continuous process? I mean, maybe it means that we'll have to do our daily moonshots episodes about something other than point releases from the frontier labs. We'll need something new to talk about because it'll just be updated behind the background.

Continual benchmarks. Like my son Jett said, okay, so another release, a little bit better. I mean, like, Dad, come on. Like, what's reeling you here? Well, actually, yeah, the, we'll see later in the pod some use case demos, but I think those will take over because it's much more exciting when you see a tick up in the intelligence. You're like, yeah, so what?

Like, look what it made. That's really good people's attention. Let's take a second and just look at that because I skipped over it. But I think one of the things that's interesting here, and I'll just play these, you know, is what we're seeing is, you mean, like, recreate your favorite game. And on the right-hand side of the equation here, we're seeing a web browser, a browser-based web app simulating an Apple desktop. I think this is, you know, we haven't talked about what the implication to the gaming industry,

which is huge, right? I'll stop that. I think it took over your computer there. It won't stop now. But I mean, what was fun the last 24 hours was seeing everybody sort of show their use of Kimmy K3. And it's impressive. Everybody becomes a creator. Everybody becomes a maker.

One warning, though. One warning. One shotting a game is very different from building the entire ecosystem and the customer service and the marketing that goes around with it, et cetera, et cetera. So you really have to be passionate about that. domain, but the friction of getting a game launched per your personal interest or your fascinations or your particular type of game that you want is near zero now, and that becomes really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually, it's mentally taxing because if you take it to the limit, which is very soon,

I can one-shot prompt to create anything. And then you're sitting with your corporate exec staff saying, well, what do we want? Yes. Well, we've never had the ability before. We never really think this way. So then you have to kind of stretch your brain to, like, well, what's the purpose of our organization in the first place? Yeah.

Here's a thought. Historically on this pod, we've done calls to action to submit outro music videos. What about a call to action to submit an outro video game that people have just casually created? That's cool. Yeah. So going to your point, Dave, I think having taste, having imagination, understanding what the public wants, I think these become the scarce elements. And for entrepreneurs out there, as you're seeing this capability, I think the entrepreneurial

mindset and the ability to imagine something even greater, I mean, what happens when you're unleashed in what you can make? Yeah, and visualizing happiness is, you know, we're not used to trying, but, you know, a lot of people don't manage their own happiness particularly well because they, you know, They have to suffer through their daily job. They have to suffer through whatever, you know, mosquito bites and geography. Like, you just have no choice. Given choice, what would you do?

And that's so liberating for the mind. But because we're not used to thinking that way, we're not ready for, like, there must be an infinite number of things. The one that's easy for everybody is medicine and biotech. Like, at least I want to be healthy. You know, that's an obvious one. But what about all the other things that make humanity happy? Have we really thought through what we could voice, you know, prompt to?

tonight. And it's really good. We are godlike in our abilities. Hence the name of your book. Yeah. Well, I mean, the idea is being a, being a creator or a maker, right, versus a consumer or taker. Salim, I saw your eyebrows go up. What do you got? No, I'm, I'm just agreeing with all of this. I think this is, there's, it's such a magical time to be alive. Everybody listening to this podcast, please think up some business idea, project, impact project, whatever, and use Zaya to go build it. I just briefly, Nick Bostrom speaks about this a bit in deep utopia. Peter, you and I speak about this quite a bit and solve everything. I'll just outright suggest folks, if listening, I would, speaking just for myself,

I'd love to see an outro video game that you casually create, It may be something in the theme of the moonshots pod since evidently we've completely solved and cooked music video creation. It'll be a first shooter game where we get to take aim at AWG. Oh, no, please. No, no, no. Ideally, a nonviolent outro video. Be careful.

Nonviolent. Civilization tech tree, that's what you need. Civilization tech tree game would be great. I want to hit one point. You know, everybody watching and listening here, you have two options when you hear about this extraordinary ascent of Kimmy K-3. Fear might be one. And the other might be, oh my God, what an extraordinary time to be alive, right? Hope and excitement and, you know, just an abundance mindset. And rather than fear, realize you are being unleashed, your creativity, your ability to do whatever

you want, the ability to create your passion, your, you know, your purpose, right? You know, find, you know, what Selim and I talk about so much is finding your massive transformative purpose, Just to distinguish between you, a passion is something you love doing. A purpose is something you love doing that actually benefits the world. And so if you can connect with that and realize that you can without any background, I mean, I think this is one of the most important things. You don't have to be a computer scientist. You don't have to be an expert.

You have to be purpose driven. And if you use these tools, you can make a dent in the universe. You can improve humanity at an awesome scale. And that's what entrepreneurship is. Three steps? read the Alex and Peter's paper, solve everything. Pick the biggest problem you dare to pick. Go download the organizational singularity clawed skill,

which is free, and start building. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, a note for our production team too here, it's so cheap and easy now to do things like Alex suggested, you know, make a video game. We should collect and post some examples for the audience so that they can say, oh, that's what Alex was talking about. But it's, you know, just a little roadmap is all people need.

It can be this long. If the audience doesn't send in amazing moonshots-oriented video games as outros, I promise. I will create a cyberpunk FPS, but it'll be a non-violent FPS, if you can imagine that oriented around moonshots. What are you shooting? You'll be tickling bunny rabbits. No, no, no. It'll be a cyberpunk FPS where we're cooking every problem. How about that?

It's a first-person solver. Not a first-person shooter. First-person solver. Love it. You've got to do the tickling bunny rabbits, too, though. Okay, I'll tickle bunny rabbits. I'm going to move us to our next story. Please let's stick with their music videos. They're great.

And, Imod, this is one you sent over the trams that I added here. So if Kimmy K-3 is the frontier going big, trillions of parameters in a data center, this story is about frontiers going small, small enough to fit on your smartphone. So Bonside 27B for a billion is the work of PrismML. It's a U.S.-based AI startup out of Caltech. It's run by Babak, Asabi, backed by Kusla Ventures, Srebras, and Google. It's the first 27 billion parameter class model to run entirely on a smartphone. Not a stripped-down version.

It is built on Quinn 3.627B. Imad, tell us about this. Why is it important? We just talked about small. language models with liquid AI on our last pod. Yeah, this is one of Dave's favorite topics, quantization, right? And PrismML and actually Tencent, which I'll talk about in a second, if I had massive advances in being able to take a model that's been trained in a 16-bit

architecture or an eight-bit architecture, like Kimi is basically eight-bit, four-bit, and take it down to Ternary, which is three bits of information or binary. So- Ternary's three values. Approximately 1.58. Yeah, that's... 1.5.6, yeah. Like, so three values. You geeks. This is really, really important.

Pay close attention, geeks, because this is a really important topic. Well, this is, again, the accuracy thing. So what Prisma ML managed to do is they managed to get the model down to ternary, which basically means, I think it was six gigabytes for the model. This 27B model, which is really performant. I think it's basically GPT5 class. from memory. Wow. Wow. With a 5% drop in accuracy, they might actually get it down to six gigabytes and with a 15% drop in accuracy down to four gigabytes. And you can get the accuracy

back too by expanding the size of the network a little bit. Sorry, there's various things you can do. And so this is a big deal because it means you have a hundred and ten, twenty IQ buddy that can work on your smartphone. Again, if without an internet connection. Without an internet connection. It's smaller than a video game. You have, you literally have this level of intelligence in your pocket all the time. Is it live? It's live. You can download the weights right now. You can run it on your smartphone. Exactly. That way you go. But this is the super interesting thing. When you reduce the bits, it also increases the speed. So from 16 bits down to three bits, it's a five times improvement in the speed.

And there was another article or another release, which is 10 cents latest model. This is actually the old Wizard L.M. team who had to leave Microsoft because Microsoft wouldn't give them compute. It's very ironic. They managed to get binary compression, so taking it all the way down for their high three model. So it's now the best on a GGX Spark or a big MacBook to take a 300 billion parameter model, the size of the new model that's coming out of inkling to work on binary with a 5% drop in performance. Wow. Yeah. And now I'm going to Sorry, Amad, this is so important. I'm only going to say this once on the pod because we're investing a lot of companies

that are working on exactly this. I don't want to tip it too much. But the implications of what Amad just said there's one more step there, which is if I imagine all of this intelligence under the covers, the computation going on has always been matrix multiplications. So I have a number, I multiply it by another number, and then I add two of those together. It's called a Mac. I multiply accumulate.

if one of those numbers is just one zero or minus one, I think we can multiply a number by one zero or minus one pretty damn efficiently. So that's the efficiency I'm not talking about, but it also opens the door for new ways to compute. And what Alex has been saying for a while, if anyone listens through it, we're going to discover new physics, but also new substrates on which we can compute, and we're going to discover that computation is possible virtually anywhere, in crystals, in liquids.

But the computation we're looking for is simply one zero minus one. So it really narrows the focus on where we look for these computing substrates that'll take AI to, you know, so what we're envisioning right now in the Dyson swarm is, you know, a bunch of GPUs from Nvidia sitting in a satellite, you know, with a solar panel and a radiator. That's only going to last a couple of years. something very different is going into space, something much more like, you know, Star Trek-E with crystals and holographs and things that are capable of doing the exact computation that I'm a mud.

You heard it here first, guys. How efficient does this get? How compressed does this go? Oh, my God. I'm a homily, Peter, on that. So this is something I think about quite a bit. So the most quantized bonsai model that we're just talking about, I think, is a problem. I think is approximately one in an eighth, 1.125 effective bits per weight. But you could ask the

question, like, is one bit per weight the limit? And the answer is no, we can go below one effective bit per weight. How do we do that? We do that with sparsity and quantization and low rate, low rank factorization. And by the way, that's what we're starting to see from some of the labs in particular, like Samsung, for obvious reasons, Samsung wants to be able to host highly capable frontier class models on their own edge devices like smartphones. Just in the past two months, Samsung published a model called NanoQuant

that breaks the one-bit, one-effective bit per weight barrier. So it's sub-1-bit, which I think we're going to be talking quite a bit more about in the future using a variety of tools. And so this is my extrapolation episode. I went through the exercise of extrapolating frontier quantization out. And naive extrapolation finds that sub one-bit quantization is going to go mainstream sometime in the next year. And then overwhelmingly likely photonic, the speed of light and photonic will be the way we're computing in the future. You made a comment.

Imad, you made a comment. Imad, you made a tweet a couple of weeks ago that said, we're going to get fable level capability on running on a normal MacBook in 18 months, right? This is essentially the path you're talking about. Yeah, so, sorry, please. Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, so if you look at what Nvidia did with their last Neumatron series, they took the big model and they actually distilled it with logits, as they're called,

down to a smaller dense model. What's the difference between a 27 billion parameter dense model and these really big sparse ones? When you have the model weights, you can actually do proper distillation. which is a bit different from the reasoning traces. And so what you're going to see is models like Kimi get distilled down to perfect data sets for smaller models that will be trained 4B and then cast down to ternary or binary or even lower

in terms of the bit weights. And when you actually look at, like, look at Quinn Max versus Quinn No27B, you can actually extrapolate what the sizes of these models will be as you move dense and you go through the whole process. You end up with a model that works on 16 gigabytes bytes of RAM by the end of next year that is the level of Kimmy K3. And you can even extract all the knowledge out of Kimmy K3 because it will be open source.

So that means every vehicle, every robot, every manufacturing device, every device in the world has their own built-in persistent intelligence and can make autonomous decisions at the edge for whatever task they can. So this decentralizes capability at the most infinite level. And it could go even one step further when you get down to ternary or binary, actually ternary is better for many things. You could build custom photonic silicon or even etch onto the silicon itself. The zero is just it doesn't have a path on it. So you can etch the model weights once they're good enough.

And that leads to an actual increase in the total speed. And you don't need to use the smaller silicon anymore. So the cost of intelligence is going to drop by 100 times anyway by the end of next year just due to the new chip sets. Speed running Star Trek. And I think this is what IMA, Dave was talking about earlier, that as we move potentially to Ternary or even sub one bit, it's far more ergonomic to adopt post-Simos type architectures underneath. There's plenty more room at the bottom.

Yeah. And to answer Peter's question. My bet there is 0.78 will be the bottom. So we're going to put that as a marker today. Okay. We can do our end of year predictions on that one. That's a really very specific number. I mean, okay, I have to ask the question of Amad.

I don't have to listen to it as bit like four times over to just kind of figure up. Do you want to go around quickly and ask everyone like what their favorite quantization endgame is? Amad, it sounds like you have a bizarrely specific one. I'll post the details of that soon. We'll let everyone else have a think about it first and then the future episode. Dave, you were going to say, Dave? I was going to say that the most likely forecast based on everything Emmett and Alex just said, we're expecting 100 to 10,000 X within three years on just the raw compute through quantization

and new compute methods. And that's, you know, that's multiplicative with the other algorithmic improvements. It's really hard to forecast. So, you know, realistically, a million X. Let's pause there one second, Dave. And just for folks to absorb that for a moment, that, you know, we've seen this incredible speed in performance and intelligence. and we're about to see, what does 10,000 or, you know, add algorithmic improvements get you to a million?

What does that feel like over the course of, what, the next three years? I mean, yeah, three years. Yeah, one thing it feels like for sure is that the AI is doing things that you really desperately want, but when it explains to you what it did, you just can't keep up. I'm already feeling this with Fable 5. You know, I've got so many Fable 5 agents running, and they're doing, the outcomes are exactly what I want. But it's like, well, what did you do? And I can't get through it all.

I had this conversation with Ray, you know, the point at which AI is asking and answering questions that you can't even grasp. Yeah. Yeah, that's very soon. So, you know, tonight back to our KAPAR conversation, the idea of slowing it down is nutty. Like, there's no regulatory concept of slowing it down that makes any sense. All we need now is some kind of a global inspection and global, you know, partnership to monitor it. and then just take advantage of all the abundance that's going to come from it. You know, all the new medicines, all the new capabilities, all the global happiness.

It's imminent. We just need to unleash it. Don't slow it down, but inspect everything. You know, this whole mechanistic interpretability is going to become the most important thing that anyone can work on. And we just need global transparency and full throttle. I think this is one of the most important podcasts we've ever had, guys. Mind-boggling. Sputnik moment.

Yeah, Sputnik moment. Moonshot's brought to you by Moonshot. Our new sponsor, yes. All right. I'm going to move us along to another fun story, one that I love talking about. It's called Predicting the Future. So there's a guy named Philip Tetlock. He's a political psychologist at University of Pennsylvania who authored a book called Super Forecasting,

The Art and Science of Prediction. After he identified what he called a group of super forecasters, These are ordinary folks who, through discipline reasoning, consistently outpredict even CIA analysts with classified information. He scores us on what's called a Breyer score, where lower is better. So now the benchmark that pits AI against these super forecasters is called the forecast bench, and it's been tracking a steady year-long climb as models close the gap. We've talked about this before on the pod. Well, the newest numbers have just come in, and according to the forecasting research,

Institute for the first time, several AI models are now statistically indistinguishable from super forecasters. So the implications, you know, if an AI can forecast novel events at super forecaster level, then every decision that we make, right, in insurance, investing, policy, geopolitics, corporate strategy gets a cheap, tireless superhuman advisor always on. I find this fascinating, right? The data is out there and the ability to be able to be. for an AI to gather it and make predictions. So at the end of the day, every political decisions could be modeled this way. Every investing decision is going to be modeled this way.

And this becomes sort of the differentiator. So who wants to jump in on this one? I'll jump in. I absolutely love this to pieces. First, a few additional pieces of context. So the number one AI super forecaster is from a British startup named Cassie, short for Cassandra, who, of course, made predictions but wasn't listened to. Interesting. What's founded by a British intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan and then advised the

British government and then formed this in part inspired by super forecasters. What I think is really interesting, though, we've spoken when we've talked about these sorts of stories in the past about Isaac Asimov's psychohistory and other riffs. I want to try a new riff here, which is an interesting thought experiment. What happens when hyper-forecasting is not just super forecasting, hyper-forecasting is connected to capital markets? What happens when the AIs, which are already AI-algo traders are already completely dominating by volume public securities markets? What happens when they have better internal, auto-regressive models of humanity than humanity does of itself? That's in some sense, it's in the same sense in which large language models were trained off of the

auto-regressive task of predicting the next token of internet text better than humans can. And now LLMs can predict, at least from a perplexity perspective, the next token I'm going to say in this sentence probably faster than I can generate it myself. What happens when these hyper-forecasters are able to generate the next actions by humanity collectively faster than humanity can take it. That's sort of the ultimate market squeeze efficiency outcome where literally, I think capital markets will be where this is maximally interesting, where the prediction is actually preemptively shaping the action of the market. And I think those who were so dismissive of the efficient market hypothesis, I think the EMH is going to be

crowned king of the capital markets once hyper-forecaster is like that. this are ultimately plugged in, which seemingly is imminent. I think this leads to wisdom, right? I think this is one of the most important things. And I've written a substack on this. I've talked about it in the past. And if you think about when you go to a wisdom council and you ask, you know, what should I do?

You go to that wisdom council because they've had so many experiences in life. They can tell you go to this path, it's not going to succeed. Go down this path. You have a higher probability. So imagine a world in which everything's being simulated to the point where an AI can tell you what is the maximal path to take for world peace or to find, you know, to find your spouse or to determine how to, you know, answer to your kids. I mean, if you can literally simulate society on a level, we have a godlike support structure to help us navigate the decades

ahead. Well, if I make this practical to an organizational level, right, think about most high level management capabilities like budgeting, hiring decision, product launches, investments in various things. Each of those is essentially a forecast, right? But you never record the probability of that or score the accuracy of that. Once you have AI forecasting that approaches that capability, this means senior management essentially evaporates. most senior management is there because they have deep expertise. If you're the head of supply chain

for BMWs because you ran supply chain for Spain or you ran supply chain for that engine. Over decades, you built up experience to net manage that domain. Once that judgment and you be hard to quantify, and not an AI system essentially can reproduce that without your biases that you have in that are inevitable for human systems, that essentially wipes out all senior management expertise. So now you need to focus even more on purpose and what you're trying to accomplish and the objectives you have, etc. It completely changes the game for senior management in any company and any government. Yeah. Imai? Yeah, so, you know, it's a topic close to my heart. In my best-selling book, The Last Economy, I actually describe how the mathematics of generative

AI can apply to economics. And soon we'll have a paper coming out that arrives all. of economics from the same math of generative AI, every single equation. It's kind of crazy. But one of the nice things here is that... Even the incorrect ones? Even the incorrect ones. It shows them as limits and why they're incorrect, which is fantastic. But one of the interesting things is in psychohistory in Isaac Asimov's foundation,

he says that entire groups and populations can be modeled like gas. And the equations of gas are the equations of diffusion models, which turn out to be better than humans at prediction. And we were going to release a whole bunch of studies. around that on economic prediction where they're outperforming. But then this raises something very interesting. Peter, you've said the wisdom, you know, Salim, you've said no senior management. The way these models will start entering is second opinions, medicine, business, policy, but then the liability profile's going to go crazy. Matchmaking. Matchmaking. Well, matchmaking. Yeah,

we have some dark things there like Black Mirror and other things. But think about it this way. if you make a decision not approved by Dr. AI, your insurance premium goes up like that. You know, if you take drive and you don't drive according to FSD in a few generations, your insurance premiums go up like that. And that recursion is something that's super interesting, because in foundation you had three requirements for psychohistory to hold. One of which was that the population is sufficiently large, and that can be like driving a car or entire economies.

The next thing is lack of technological advances of sufficient levels, so technological stagnation, because that can change the entire landscape of what's new. And the final thing was ignorance. And so, you know, Alex just mentioned these things coming into the market change it, but these things coming into making a healthcare decision or a government decision or a company decision actually changes the way. It's like, hey, you're my match made in heaven according to the AI. How can you argue against the AI?

Worst pickup line ever right now, but who knows in a few years, right? This is very meta, the sort of reflexivity in economics, I think many would call it if the best predictor ends up being named after Cassandra and no one believes it. They can make the money, it's okay. You can slice the irony with a knife. Dave, have you seen any startups in this area? No, shockingly, no. You know, Save Super Intelligence, Ulius Sutskiver may be doing a version of this, but they're keeping it in-house and launching it toward markets and printing money internally.

But the version I'd love to see very soon, I think a huge amount of human unhappiness comes from consumerism and consumer marketing. And, you know, like Homer Simpson comes home at 6 p.m., cracks open a beer, lies down on the couch and starts channel surfing, and then, you know, like naked and afraid is on, ends up watching it until falls asleep on the couch. wakes up the next morning with a hangover having not brushed his teeth, kicks the dog and it ends up with unhappy kids.

That chain of decisions is so bad. But there's no explicit decision to live that life in that chain, right? It's just, you just reacted to the beer ad and then you went down this chain. And I think AI is going to be an incredible coach to say, hey, dude, you know, what if you take this alternate path

and here's the outcome you're going to get to? Love that. That to me is forecasting used correctly for just changing, like, are we anywhere near optimal? And the answer is no. If you objectively look at your life, nobody's near optimal. But with a little AI assistance, you can get on a much better path. But what we do right now is it's massive consumerism.

You're reacting to billboards. You're acting to TV ads. It's telling you you need certain things. And people tend to get sucked into these pathways. I think we can get out of those pathways with AI. That's brilliant. You know, just to say, first of all, There is a rumor out there that Ilya, SSI, is going to be releasing something very shortly.

I think everybody's feeling the pressure to release. We saw that with mirror coming out, so interesting to see. But the point you made, I think, is brilliant, is are these labs actually, you know, pulling their punches, holding on this capability to generate revenue on their own? I mean, if you had this super forecasting capability in the markets today, you would do that. I remember having a conversation with Eric Schmidt, who said, you know, listen, if Google wanted to maximize its income, it knows exactly which companies are going to have a stock bump in the fourth quarter because everybody's Googling this product or that product. We've advanced information about where the sales are going to be and which products are going to peak. But if we could only do that once, and then we'd be shut down.

So interesting to see if these companies, and, you know, Alex, you and I've talked about the fact and solve everything. the notion that the greatest money, the greatest income these frontier labs are going to make is going to be as they solve scientific breakthroughs and superconducting and age reversal and so forth. Exactly. And maybe just a footnote on the Google story. So I've had this conversation with Google execs many, many times over the years. Totally agree with the premise that if Google were to attempt stock trading based on arguably insider or unfiltered insider information passing through the query stream, that that's a one and done. type shutdown scenario, but there are other things that Google hypothetically could be trading besides public securities that would necessarily have the blowback. For example, again, hypothetically, foreign exchange rates. Yeah. I think that we have to be careful here, though. Like, I think there's the market side of things and, you know, like maybe, maybe I'll launch a hedge

fund based on our own stuff, but there's the moral side of things. Maybe not. Maybe not. I guess. Okay. Of course. But look, there's the moral side of these things. Like, it's fantastic that we can optimize ourselves, but who controls these models and the advice they give can control vast ways of humanity. And there needs to be a real discussion about this.

Because it's like the people that follow their GPS into a lake. Yeah, that's the risk. We're going to rely on these far too much. And again, how can you debate it in just a few years' time? Like, again, you will, it'll be more expensive not to do this. You will be penalized for not listening. And if we're all watched over by machines of loving grace, we need to know whose grace that is. And again, that discussion is start now.

Yeah. Salim just said beer. Just as beer. Homer drinking beer advised by AI was not on my bingo card for this episode. Welcome to the health section of moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest text. technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm here today with an extraordinary physician, the chief

medical officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Don Musilam, Dawn. Let's talk about cancer. You know, I know from the member database that we have at Fountain are members who come in who think they're healthy. It turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about. That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. People, you don't feel the cancer until stage 3 or stage 4. And if you don't know what's going inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed. And you can know. And so when members come through found, how do they detect cancers?

So we're doing full body MRI. And we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very, very important. And these are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering. But the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research and work hard. to democratize wellness. Yeah.

So at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to know. So check out FountainLife. You can go to fountenlife.com slash Peter to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning at stage one when it is curable

before it gets to stage three or stage four in your world of hurt. So, Salim, you sent me an article, a chart. I want to just put this up here right now. This is our constant debate and we're seeing this again across data center wars in the United States. Data centers are, you know, sucking up electricity, driving up the cost for consumers, and also water, right? It's one of the loudest criticisms of AI right now is that data centers are guzzling drinking water to cool their servers.

So this week, this particular chart, and I'm showing, you know, made the rounds, and it pairs two figures. On one side, every data center in the entire U.S., according to Lawrence Burr. National Labs is consuming 17 billion gallons of water on site. But what it shows is American golf courses that have soaked up 531 billion gallons of irrigation since 2024. That's 31 times as much. And so, you know, the posters I'm going to start seeing on the sides of the highways is forget data centers. We must ban golf courses immediately. Yeah, where's, Peter, where's the Chinese influence campaign to get America to shut down its golf courses. Yeah, I tell you, I don't see it anyplace.

But here's the shocking piece of data. Besides golf courses, California almond farming alone consumes one trillion gallons of water, 60 times all the data centers combined. I have one other stat, which is Amazon warehouses occupy 10 times more land in the U.S. than all the data centers combine. Yeah. So it's such as dot in the bucket, a drop in the bucket compared to everything else

in terms of land usage, water usage. The hue and cry is such a completely non-data-driven garbage bullshit. It's unreal. Exactly. That's the concern because the water use is such a non-issue. I mean, it's such a joke. But if we take that head on and say, guys, don't worry about water.

You know that the angry crowd is going to move to something else, equally irrational. So the underlying problem doesn't go away, which is, you know, the next issue is going to be something semi-sane. This is completely insane, but something semi-sane, but still wrong. And then that's going to create a populist movement. And, you know, the word moratorium, like, let's just stop. Like, what kind of a decision, what kind of governance is, let's just stop? But if you look at the history of nuclear and a whole bunch of other things, that's the actual outcome we get. And so, yeah, David Sachs. I mean, this is the pandemic fear that I keep on speaking about that I'm very concerned about. There's an underlying sense that

AI and robotics are going to, you know, combat humanity are going to be our foes. And again, I'll just go back to it. It's, I blame to some degree Hollywood, right, of all the dystopian movies out there. And if all you see is negative visions of the future, you're going to want to shut it down. And what do you want to shut down? How can you shut down AI? Well, you can shut down the data center in your state. Yeah, also, just elephant in this particular room, the Dyson swarm. If the compute all moves to sun synchronous orbit, you can do closed loop liquids, including water and other coolants there, but it's not like it's going to be consuming on margin additional water. And then to Dave's point, the complaints, which may or may not be in part

the result of an influence operation from a foreign state actor, will move to something else. be very low Earth orbit, SpaceX star mines, and other competing. Dyson swarms are polluting the atmosphere with their decay or something else. The complaint will move on to something else. Did you hear the rant about the starship rocket launches earlier? It was Falcon, actually. The pollution from the Falcon launches. Elon was just like, oh, my God, I'm going to vomit right right now. It was like 0.0.0.1% of all emissions come from any, form of rocket lunch. It's like, but he's, you have to actually answer these questions. He'd just drive it in a nuts. I hope those individuals who are complaining have, you know,

thrown away their smartphones, don't use GPS and are just basically going back to subsistence farming. Yeah, as Elon likes to say, let them shake their fists at the sky. I have a fun start. I was doing some numbers around the water thing. It's about 600 gallons of water per Big Mac and McDonald's sells 2 billion burgers a year. So it's about twice the number of golf courses, the total amount of water that McDonald's uses. That I can get behind. Okay. So what you're saying about is Chinese influence ops should also be shutting down American Big Macs.

Well, there you go. It'd be a stab to the heart of America. Yeah, we'll definitely improve the health of America as well. Shall we move to one of our favorite conversations, humanoid robots? This is so cool. Yeah. So China, as we've discussed before, has gone all in on humanoid robots. It's a national priority. Companies like Unitri and others are racing to commercialize. You know, last report, and Alex, we've talked about this, 150 humanoid robot companies in China under development. And part of their strategy is spectacle. And something you're trying to bring Alex to America. They've been staging public robot combat events. literally, you know, uh, MMA style. And we've got a video to show.

Let me just go ahead and pull this up here of a recent, uh, MMA that went viral on the internet. And, uh, it's a beautiful thing. Oh, so cool. These are only going to get better. You got to watch the full video. It's just the way the fight ends is epically awesome.

Yeah. One of the robots kicks the other robots head off. You know, remember rockem-sockham robots? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a game as kids. And so this goes viral. I mean, a lot going on in the robot world. We just saw Hyundai, all of the workers at Hyundai start to strike

because they don't want robots brought in on their assembly line. That was fascinating. Alex, take it from here. A few thoughts on this. thoughts on many different levels. One is mild horror that if anyone who's seen Stephen Spielberg's movie AI, where there's, without spoiling it too much, I think Stephen would call it the dark sandwich at the center of the movie, the flesh fair where humanoid robots are tortured and abused for human entertainment, I think utterly horrifying. So at one level I'm mildly,

horrified that humanoid robots, no matter the extent to which they're being teleoperated here, are setting an inductive prior or bias for future, more autonomous, embodied intelligences to be basically trying to kill each other or at least otherwise abuse, physically abuse each other for human entertainment. I'm concerned about that. But one level deeper. Now imagine that these robots are more autonomous, that they're running algorithms that are on the edge, so they're much more encapsulated. And now imagine that these humanoids are in the Chinese PLA infantry. Yeah. Because I think that's the future that we are almost certain to find ourselves in. The West needs to catch up in humanoids. That's why I've supported pro-R-L, which Peter you were

gesturing at, which ran the first humanoid robot mini-marathon in America and the Boston Seaport. a number of months ago, the West- Which you helped organize, right? Correct. Yeah. So the West needs something like this. Hopefully less violent and more economically productive. I'd love to see people cheering on humanoid robots competing to iron clothing or perform some

economically productive task and not just kicking each other's heads off. You prefer the humans to be doing that in the MMA matches? I prefer no one to be doing it. I'm not a fan of MMA. I think it's destructive to humans and I worry about the message that we're sending to the future light cone by having robots doing instead of humans. I'd rather see people in a cage competing if they must compete at all to do something that's positive, some, not negative. A coding, like a cage match coding? If anything.

Or just sitting there, okay. So I have a couple of thoughts. One is my normal commentary around kickboxing is not the greatest marketing demo for humanoid robots. But I will acknowledge something here. This is like unbelievably demanding engineering environment, right? You've got a stress test. It's stressing balance and impact resistance and recovery and locomotion and latency.

All like, there's about 20 things that they're doing. And it's kind of incredible to watch them navigate that. Of course, a forearm robot would beat the two arm. So I'll just leave it to that. So, hello, there we go. So, you know, but this is. This is competitive, you know, we're going to see this go to competitive sports. We'll see a version of the World Cup with robotics.

Question is whether people will watch that or not. Yeah, I'll say that the real test is whether a human being can make that penalty shot under pressure at that top point in the game. Although, like, watching England implode the other day was really devastating for me. But still, it's really, I think the people much rather watch people in that environment rather than robots. Yeah, I think sports is going to thrive for many, many decades to come. Formula racing pushes the edge. And I think when we start to see robotic sports, it's pushing the edge. I think the point you just made, Salim, is important, right,

that we're going to see this happening in a competitive fashion so that the top robots, and I can't wait to see figure versus optimist. I think that will be a fun competition, whatever form it takes. I think that these robots are a little bit different though. Like I think probably you'll first see the real steel type of teleoperated robots because robots can't actually respond fast enough if you look at the latency of a VLA model. Like this is impressive from some pre-operated flying kicks,

but why aren't they doing kung fu? When will robots do kung fu? That's when you move to things like etch silicon when you move to teleoperation. And I think that will be the next stage that comes next year. But I think there's a bigger issue that I have with this, although I love fighting robots and I can't wait to see gun dams and all that. These robots are engine AI T-8-800s.

They weigh about 70 kilograms and they punch four times harder than Mike Tyson. So they could legitimately kill someone, us fleshy humans. Robots like that should not be allowed on the streets and there's no regulation against that. You know, like again, they could be in the PLA, People's Liberation Army or whatever. But robots are about to enter our household. I mean, who here has a one-X robot on order? You know, like, come on. It's coming.

They will be walking around very soon. We need to have regulations about safety of what the talks are on these things, of how they operate and others, because they represent a real threat to individuals because they are machinery. Then beyond that, you will have the embodiment and others. I mean, to have the discussion of what that looks like when they are autonomous. Because these things are delivering themselves by pushing a button on the door, you know, like bringing your doorbell. And the final thing is, unitary has only made 11,000 robots, humanoids, total. We are literally at the very start of this.

A few years from that will be 11 million a year from 11,000. So we've got to have this discussion fast as well. Lots of talking to do. Yeah. I mean, this is what the work you and I were doing, you know, in terms of how do governments sort of counsel their policymaking around these areas. and it's happening at a blinding speed. Crazy.

Yeah. All right, I'm going to move us to the most important conversation you always have, which is the Dyson Swarm. And let's take a look at a video from our friend Sam Morgan. I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous. It will make sense someday. But if you just do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power we can do on Earth,

to say nothing of how you're going to fix a broken GPU in space, and they do break a lot still, unfortunately. We are not there yet. There will come a time. Space is great for a lot of things. Orbital data centers are not something that's going to matter at scale this decade. All right. We have the continuing MMA battle

between Elon and Sam. Yeah, so fascinating. I'm curious of reactions here. Alex, I'll go to you first. Yeah, I think there's an obvious conflict of interest. We saw a similar messaging from Masa Sun regarding lack of purported promise for orbital data centers. Remember, OpenAI has retreated from its own data centers. Remember, Project Stargate. Project Stargate has been rebranded from OpenAI owning and operating its own data centers to just leasing terrestrial data center capacity from others. Open AIs delaying its own IPO. So just not even at the object level. One has to look at Open AIs messaging here and say perhaps it's not even in a financial or operational position at the moment to lean into orbital data centers, say, the way Anthropic, which in their collaboration agreement, which was announced with SpaceX

AI and for use of Colossus and Colossus 2, far friendlier to orbital data. center-based compute. So I think the crossover is going to happen. Elon's messaging regarding when this crossover is going to happen is two to three years. You see other analyses that suggests that the unit economics for orbital versus terrestrial data center costs are going to cross over sometime by the early 2030s. I'm not sure which is the case, but either way, I think there is an obvious conflict of interest. And just as we were discussing with Philip Johnston, barring some surprising left turn, I expect that OpenAI's tune is very conveniently going to change on ODCs sometime in the next two to three years right on time. And of course, Elon's response to this is we'll be launching them in two years.

So stay tuned and watch. Well, I think anyone listening to this video would say, okay, Sam says space data centers make no sense. Elon says they make sense. They two guys hate each other. But if you actually listen closely to Sam's words, they don't disagree at all. Sam is saying that space data centers will not be meaningful this decade. There will come a time. But this decade is only three and a half years left.

And if you look at Elon's forecast of his launch rate, that they agree, actually. So they're just hating on each other all the time. And it seems that way in this phrasing, but the truth is pretty clear. They both have the same numbers. So Alex is right. They're going to space. It's going to take a while. I think a couple percent of all computer will be in space by the end of the decade.

because we're building out on land as quickly as we can too. And the ocean. But then the lines cross. Yeah. You know, Alex, you and I were going back and forth texting while the Starship attempt, Starship 13 flight was making an attempt a couple of days ago and it's been rescheduled. When this pod comes out, we'll be seeing a next launch attempt on Starship 13 on Monday of this coming week. That launch was thwarted at T-minus zero when two of the-first-first time I've ever.

seen that, by the way. Yeah. But here's the point. Two of the 33 Raptor engines on the booster stage of Starship did not ignite and they're going to be replaced. But here's the extraordinary point. So by the way, you know, SpaceX's stock dropped 5% on news of that failed launch, which is kind of ridiculous.

The point people need to realize is that was an amazing demonstration of technology. The fact that you could shut down at T-equal. zero, safe the vehicle, unload the methane and the liquid oxygen. And that's an, you know, I was part of the space industry in the 90s before it was a space industry. And those vehicles would have exploded on the spot, right? They would have failed on the spot. The ability we have to control them at that level of detail is evidence of the extraordinary engineering that SpaceX has done. I thought that was the most interesting part, which is how quickly the system diagnoses the problem and returns. It would have taken months and months to do this and fix it and recover everything

and re-plan another launch. And you're like, yeah, we have a problem, shut it down, we do it. Oh, we're starting Monday. I mean, it's amazing. Yeah. Extraordinary. I think if you're serious about spending intelligence with what we know, you have to have a space play. Open air is going to buy like Planet Labs or something like that, you know, like then the tune will change. All right. I'm going to go to some AMA questions. So, Imod, you had suggested I post questions to X and we have a number of questions coming about Kimmy from our ex audience. Let me go ahead and show these and let's dive in. So Imad, I'm going to give you first crack. Which of these questions do you want to answer? I think probably number four is an

interesting one. Given Kimmy K3's lower token efficiency, is it actually as cost effective as advertise compared with Sol or Fable. So KBK3 is an expensive model relative to the other Chinese models. Like DeepSeek is now a dollar per million tokens. Kimi K3 is $15. Sonnet is 20, opus is $40. And I think like Fabel is $60. But that's because they're actually making money. When you back out the numbers from the Chinese models and the chips they're running on, they're probably making 80, 90% margins now. And that's with their Chinese chips, which aren't that efficient for running this. We will see the cost of K3 dropped by 10 to 50 times, I think, in the next few months as it gets optimized.

And right now it uses twice the number of tokens for the same task versus GPT5.6. Again, a frontier model that uses 37% less tokens in 5.5 or Fable. Again, we're going to see that drop because everyone in their dog is going to optimize the crap out of this. Like you've seen fireworks just raised at a $17 billion valuation, others like Modal at $10 billion, base 10 at $10 billion. These are the inference providers of open source models. They've all raised a billion dollars that they're not going to spend to optimize the Chinese model and make it more efficient and run it. And so American labs who do the inference side of things are going to optimize the crap out of this. So we will see it catch up.

All right. And by the way, I welcome the mate to lean in on. of these questions. But Salim, you want to go next? Given that I made the comment about number one, how much could Kimmy K3 devalue U.S. frontier models? I'll stick with my original estimate of about 75%, 50% from the U.S. regulating the front end. And then you've got lack of compute on the supply side plus the front open source models kind of within a release barely of where you are. That bleeding edges, such a perishable thing. I would say 75% drop. So if opening out's worth a trillion bucks,

I'd put it at $250 billion, you still have a very valuable business because now the competitiveness, you have to compete on reliability, security, integrated tools, ease of deployment. But the actual frontier cutting edge, it becomes one ingredient amongst the whole thing. You know, I would not want to be inside these frontier labs right now. It must be a frenetic code red 24-7. It is a total rat race. I have so many friends at the frontier labs, friends who are jumping hypothetically from one frontier lab, Google, which is nowhere at this point, missing an action to other frontier labs. It is a total rat race. Yeah, it's crazy. Dave? You have a choice for me? No, pick one. You got two and three, I think.

Okay, I'll take two. What does the release of Kimmy K-3 do with, due to the open source versus closed-source race? Will this force the large companies to provide more product? I think they're implying more open-source product. Yeah, it's a total game changer in the sense that anyone with resources can can build an internal model that's tailored to a specific use case and then use it as a defensive moat. I don't think the large U.S. model providers will go open source. I think they're committed to their pathway. So if you were talking to Anthropic right now, they would say, look, Kimmy has caught up for a week, but Fable 5.1 is coming out in just a few weeks. When you look at the all-important enterprise use cases, so, you know, white-collar automation,

drug discovery, people are going to use the best model no matter what. And, you know, it's like if you're using an AI to design a car or a rocket, a slight improvement in the design has massive payoff. So you're going to use the best of the best of the best model. So the anthropic guys are going to scramble to stay a step ahead and keep their price point nice and high. The cost of the model itself is so small compared to the benefit that people will pay the price. So it does create, like Alex was saying, the rat race is incredible. But people aren't going to switch to Kimmy unless it's proprietary data they want to keep in-house and they want to turn to their own, or Kimmy actually bypasses Anthropic, which it hasn't done. You know, it's only caught up or not even quite caught up.

All right, Alex, number three. All right. Number three asks, and then these are, I think these questions seem to all be variations on a theme, but it asks, how can U.S. models, I think this means U.S. frontier model providers continue to justify their massive valuations if China can leapfrog with an open weight model at less than half the token cost. So I don't think the premise is quite accurate. There are so many elements, so many layers to superintelligence. And quite frankly, superintelligence itself is, as it fully develops, I think, far larger than the total GDP of the entire world anyway. There's an enormous amount of pie that can be sliced. But to the extent we're talking about, say, Google, which, as I was mentioning earlier, seems to be MIA.

at this point on the frontier. I can't find a single top Google model at this point on the cost frontier for capabilities. What does Google do? Well, they can continue to race, obviously, in terms of capabilities. But if I'm Google, I'm thinking, yeah, I want to become a hyperscaler. I mean, Google obviously is a hyperscaler, but a hyperscaler provider to other frontier labs. That's one obvious venue of differentiation. And we've seen that approach vector from, SpaceX AI itself, which is now signed deals with Anthropic. We're seeing it with Meta, interestingly, which on the one hand is offering Spark 1.1. And on the other hand, in the past two days, just as we were going to air, it was announced that meta is exploring, selling $10 billion of compute to

anthropic. So differentiating by going downstack and offering your compute up to other more competitive providers, whether Western, usually Anthropic, sometimes Open AI, or Chinese models. in a self-hosting model. That's one area. You can also go upstack. You can try to vertically integrate and offer applications that are benefiting from the commoditization of their complement, namely the model layer. You can also, I think the premise that valuations somehow are going to net shrink just because Kimi K3 exists now is completely fallacious. We saw that incorrect thinking happen with the original Deep Seek shock, which was at the time also branded as a Sputnik moment. So we saw a bit of a hiccup in capital markets at the time. But as always, Jevin's

paradox kicks in, and we see the value of chip stocks, ultimately increase, not deflate. And we also see it's open, it's open weight. So there's absolutely nothing in Kimmy K3 that OpenAI and Anthropic and other Western Frontier Labs can't just immediately reappropriate for their own internal models. You don't think that the amount of revenue these labs are going to make because gets reduced as people start to use Kimmy K-3 for their work instead of the API calls? No. For example, so I spend at my portfolio companies spend an extraordinary amount on let's say Anthropic and Open AI. And to my knowledge, that my expectation is, Moonshot would have to release like a 2x, 3x, 10x better model than,

say, Thabel 5 to have a massive diversion of that spend. Right now, what K3 buys at the moment, to the extent it's legal, query how much longer K3 will be legal to host within the U.S. But assuming it remains legal and regulatorily uninhibited, all it results is greater in-house self-hosting, but it's not at the top of the frontier, to Dave's earlier point, Fable 5 at the moment is. So if you're trying to do, like, solve the frontierist of problems, K3 is not causing you to divert your spend. Well, let me hit that point you just made, Alex, and ask you and the other mates a question here, which is, do you think it's possible that K3,

that some legal policy United States prevents U.S. companies from downloading K3? It's going to be on the open internet. It's going to be available through. a multitude of sources beyond hugging face. Can it be shut down in the U.S.? It can effectively be, this is not prescriptive, and I'm not a fan of this policy, but I think it can effectively be shut down by requiring that every public corporation

disclose any use of Chinese open-weight models and subjecting them to scrutiny. As we were going to air, the latest, we talked in the last pot about Demis' proposal to create a FINRA-like entity that would regulate the frontier. Well, guess what? The reports are that the present administration is actually running with a proposal like that and is planning to, or at least exploring, creating a FINRA-like agency

to regulate frontier AI that would live under the SEC because the SEC already has statutory authority to operate FINRA-like industry advised and funded entities. So it's a natural place from statutory organizations. Yeah. Self-regulated governance, aka regulatory. regulatory capture cartels under the SEC. And so I think it's completely plausible, albeit, I think, highly undesirable that we get some time in the future. An SEC suborg that looks like FINRA that basically makes it completely economically infeasible for corporations of any size, especially public corporations, to actively use Chinese open weight models. Any other comments on this?

I've got comment on this. I mean, this is ridiculous in terms of trying to. limit the use here. Because once you release the weights, right, stopping them, you can mirror them across jurisdiction. You can use Peter Pryard networks, hello VPNs. All you're going to do is deny American researchers and startups access to those models and security experts. Well, the rest of the world goes ahead on building on those models. I don't think there's a viable approach. I mean, this is the same as denying Americans cheap insulin.

I mean, it's, again, regulatory capture, right? Like, why can't you have generics? Because, again, you have the regulatory capture point. There's operation, I think they're calling it Gold Eagle, to approve access to frontier models. You will have anti-token laundering regulations. You will have know-your-prompter regulations. Like, the US government's really realized that this technology is about to break through. And I think that they're a lot more worried about it than China is.

you know like China again you look at that Xi Jinping speech I would urge everyone to kind of check it out they're like full on open source we're going to do this America doesn't know what it's going to do but as you said there's a real chance that they might hobble American capitalism and oddly China's encouraging capitalism it's going to get very thankful. CCP saves American capitalism from itself it's a crazy future the world is so weird bizarre all right let's go back to you selim Next question. Okay, which some of these are a little bit duplicative, yeah.

Yeah, I'll take number five. Would you trust Kimmy K3 to write your code for you without oversight or review? The answer is no, but I wouldn't trust a human being to put consequential, untested code into production either, right? The question is not whether we trust the model, it's whether we trust the development system around it. So, you know, AI generated code needs to be running a sandbox and pass automated test and security scanning and all sorts of things before it goes into production. And then you do proportionate permissions based on the use case and on the potential impact.

This is the same thing we talk about. Whatever the workflow is that AI is running, you're still going to need human review at the highest level and at the highest consequential inputs. A lot of the routine can be automated. But the scalable model is not AI with no oversight. It's machine generated plus verification, plus human accountability combined. That's going to give you the real power. All right.

EMI. Yeah, I think what role if anything distillation play in K-3 development? They distilled data clearly from Opus and others. But to be honest, Using Kimmy K2.5 and Kimmy K3 now quite intensely, it feels different. So I think they did a lot of their own data creation, based in part from distillation, but everyone's disillating from each other right now.

The one area that it's clear that they've had a big leap ahead is in the front-end development. Again, this isn't the best mathematician in the world, although it's quite a good general model. It's not the best cyber attacker from our benchmarks, but they've kind of done something original and new on the front-end game consumer slash entertainment side of things, which I think is really interesting. Although that might be also because it's a multimodal model.

Dave? Number seven, what are the reasons why Kimmy K-3 might not be as good as advertised or we shouldn't use it? The scenario where it's not as good as advertised is if it's bench-maxed and, you know, in two weeks, you know, the open source will be out. We'll have beaten it to death. We'll know the answer. if they bench maxed. So we're going to find out,

I think it's unlikely that it's bench max to the point where every company in America right now should be, in the world right now, should be saying, we need a crash program with our best possible advisors

to decide are we going to do our own model on our own on-prem hardware or are we going to use Anthropic or OpenAI or Google and just trust that API. But we need to decide whether tuning and training on our own proprietary data gives us a long-term competitive advantage.

And so there's going to be a desperate shortage of good advice on this and vendors and McKinsey consultants. And you've got to grab those resources quickly. Exo consultants, you know, make seed stage investments, get your network together, find out who can answer that question for you internally on your business and your use case quickly and then commit to the path. And, you know, you can do something internally, still use the APIs. But if you don't start down the path of evaluating Kimmy K3 on your own, you can't really come back to it later. So I think everybody's got to just get going on this question. We'll know in a couple weeks, though, whether it was benchmark to hell or not. But I think it's

very, very likely that the open source path is a viable path for every U.S. and world company and government now. Can I just add to that real quick? Yes, of course. Very simple suggestion for every company. implement two installations, Kimmy K3 and Inkl, fine-tune your own internal data because that learning loop is going to be the proprietary goal that you don't want to lose and start there. Alex, why you close this out here? You've sort of answered number six already, but perhaps you can expand on it. Yeah, I'll say something new. So question six asks, should the U.S. move to block loading the weights of the next Kimi release onto Hugging Face? I'll give a conditional answer.

I think that if some party, presumably in the U.S., can prove to a cognizant court that the next Kimmy release, presumably a reference to this Kimi release, was somehow obtained or derived illegally, maybe through copyright infringement or illegal distillation of traces or something like that, that would probably be grounds for blocking its release in the U.S. But if no one can prove that Kimmy's parent, Moonshot, did anything otherwise wrong in creating it, no. I don't think the U.S. should be blocking its release in the process. I think, if anything, quite the opposite. I think every U.S. Frontier Lab should be closely scrutinizing it and learning whatever they can so that we can leapfrog it. And I would like to see far more outward pressure from U.S. labs creating the best in the world, open weight and open source models so that it's not the CCP with their new belt and road for AI initiative, blanketing the world. Some would even say dumping superintelligence on the rest of the world or the so-called global south. It should be the US, the canon of freedom, the arsenal of

freedom that's also the arsenal of superintelligence showering the rest of the world with open weight and open source superintelligence, not China. showering the rest of the world. I love that. And remember, we're moving towards intelligence too cheap to meter, but a million times more available and more powerful than ever before. Everybody listening, I'm grateful on behalf of the Moonshotmates here for your time. If you haven't subscribed, please do. We're going to be putting this out more and more often as we're starting to see the release dates move from months and weeks to days. And there's no time to sleep during the singularity.

Gentlemen, what's in store for the week ahead? Imad, I'll go to you next, Selim. Yeah. Imad, what's news in your life? Yeah, just getting a whole bunch of research papers ready to release. So finally, it's going to be exciting. Yeah, again, more acceleration. For intelligent internet, your company, yes?

Yes. Incredible. Selim, please. Tuesday, I have my next meaning of life session, 7 p.m. Eastern, for those that are interested. Where do they go to find out? We'll have the link below, but it's opening XO. slash openingexo.com slash mOL. So if you've not participated in one of one of Sileem's meaning of life sessions,

they are extraordinary. It'll take you beyond the AI into the realm of philosophy and theology. Alex, are you traveling? Coming up, what's going on with you? I'm so focused at this point on literally solving everything. I'll say large swaths of the sciences at this point are so thoroughly cooked. more to come on that subject. Peter, you and I wrote, solve everything about it, but now it's actually coming true. Yeah, I'm excited. You're going to be doing an AMA with my abundance community

coming up. That's going to be a fun deep dive. And of course, we're going to have you during the moonshots gathering on September 25th doing it. In fact, all of us will be here. Imod, you're joining us in L.A. in September. Yeah, it's going to be fun to have all of us together again for the full day. Dave, you know, this has got to be the most exciting time to be in Link Studios. Oh, my God, yeah. I think that discussion we had of quantization on this podcast that Imod kicked off, I think that now vaulted to my new best piece of media ever recorded, passing Leopold to Hashanbrunner.

I got to go back and listen to that again in slow-mo. And also, you know, we had Vlad Bolivich from MIT Nano in this week. He's going to advise and help us on our new startup working on Photonauton. computing and he gave us a whole roadmap of people I need to meet next week. So we're we're looking to add to MIT people with our Princeton team to work on just the photonics, quantized photonics side of the equation. So I'll be working on that next week. But I think I can take that video we shot earlier and use it as a recruiting tool. It was just so freaking brilliant. You guys are incredible. Yeah. I love you guys so much. What a great week. Awesome conversation.

We'll see what breaks tomorrow. Yeah, over the weekend. Emergency pods begin. We need emergency pods every day by January. All right, be well, everybody. Thank you for tuning in to Moonshot, your front row seat in the singularity. Take care, guys. Peter, awesome job as always.

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