AI Experts Debate: AI Job Loss, The End of Privacy & Beginning of AI Warfare w/ Mo Gawdat, Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #176

30:45What do they do and the conversation I had with Sanjay which I agree with is the job of the future is being an entrepreneur And so his mission in India is upskilling all of these Young students to become entrepreneurs to create new job opportunities for themselves You know Dave How do you think this plays out? I think that you know we're way underestimating the creativity of people and that there's this window of time the next four years where the empowerment of people to create is so outweighs the risk. And I do agree, you know, we're choosing driver because it's a really tough case. You know, it's the number one job and title in the world is driver.

31:31It's a huge number of people. But if you look at graphic designers as a case study too, I think they're empowered much more than they're replaced. And there are all these case studies popping up of VO3 artists that are so much more productive. And so I think that when I look at entrepreneurs, you know, work with hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years, what they need is time and the ability to act so tools, time and tools. And there's very likely a world coming up over the next four years where they're given time, whether it's UBI or otherwise, and they can act. Because very often, you know, that some of the best most creative people, they can't act on their ideas largely because they're trapped in mortgage, they're trapped in student debt.

32:18They just need money now. And so then they go, they become an Uber driver for a while, they become a whatever for a while, they go work at Google for a while. But their freedom of action is very, very limited. And I think that AI has the opportunity to open up freedom of action, freedom of action unleashes creativity. So exactly as Saleem was saying, there's so much latent entrepreneurial talent. And this next window of four years is going to be dominated by the ability to build scaffolding. And scaffolding is a word you're going to hear a ton now going forward. Because the AI doesn't naturally do something interesting or useful for you.

32:54It'll write all the code, it'll build everything, it'll audit, it'll write all the documents. It does all the busy work very, very well in the next four years. But it doesn't decide this is what my user base, my community, my, you know, this is what people will want and that's still coming from from entrepreneurs and so this this slide is exactly right This is the dominant Let's go ahead and read this out if you would do Job of the future is entrepreneur Near term next two to five years, you know many jobs will be impacted this decade, 2030, medium term. So the medium term, 2030 to 2045 is the part where no one can quite visualize.

33:32I have a great sense of the next four years and then a much more difficult sense of what happens from 2030 and beyond. It'll clearly be an age of incredible abundance. So the opportunity to make everybody happy is right in front of us, just question of how you do it. Yeah, but in the singularity sprint. Yeah, let me try that one. Yeah. Yeah, so the idea here of the singularity sprint is you have a window of time to build something awesome And that window is limited so Read says the anxious all -out rush to launch bold projects or startups right now driven by the fear that rapidly advancing AI Will soon erode human leverage and make long horizon careers that's obsolete in quote after graduation a lot of my friends and skip safe jobs for their own ventures, classic singularity sprint vibes.

34:28So it's like, if you wanna make it big, you gotta dive in right now, both feet. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, this is what started with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both being 21 when the PC comes out. They have no career path, right? They're within a year of age of each other. They're old enough to start a company, but they're young enough that they're not in law school, they're not in some entrenched 401k plan. and they're just free to act. And so Steve Jobs -Bill Gates, then you forward to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg drops out, starts Facebook, but you see this over and over again in recent history where flexibility, way out performs career -pathing.

35:07So going forward, of course, that's gonna accelerate with the singularity. So now, yeah, you'd be crazy to get too deep into some trench when you know the amount of change is accelerating like crazy. So, yeah, this is clearly the world we're moving into. Opportunity is everywhere. And the expansion of opportunity is just fractal and rampant. And so, so many things you can do to add value, but they're not things that you would have anticipated a year prior, so you need to be really nimble and flexible and, you know, stay frosty. You know, watch this podcast, read The Alex Wisner Gross Feed, like just stay on top of it because new things are appearing all the time.

35:47Mo bring us back to reality here. Do you disagree with this? So I think Dave's point is so spot on. If you're 21 like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you know, if you really think about those who already have a mortgage, how will you be eye work for those? Because remember, we pay people for the value they bring. So when nobody's really bringing value, then do you pay someone who has a mortgage and for kids a little more than someone who has a mortgage and two kids or do you reward someone who worked on a shoe string for a while and didn't have a mortgage? I don't know. But my question is, are we thinking about those things?

36:33And then, of course, when we talk about entrepreneurship, it's so easy for us to talk about that. that everyone here has started or co -founded or invested in tens, if not hundreds of companies. That's not natural for people who are trained all their life to just go get a job. And all of that, by the way, everyone here knows, I am the biggest believer in total abundance. Once we cross this short term dystopia, if you want, total abundance, like we can create a world that we can't even dream of. It's just that we have to be super realistic about the challenges in the short term and rather than talk about the opportunities and tell people, hey you take charge, you go and we go ahead and start a business.

37:23I mean honestly, even I today am struggling to start a business at this pace. I mean seriously and I've started countless businesses. Yeah, I mean, so just to keep up. Yeah, the speed of disruption is crazy. Yeah. Can I flip over to most side of the equation for a second? Yes, please. So I think there's in the US, I would say you don't have to worry at all at a country level just because the latent amount of entrepreneurship is so deeply embedded into the culture, right? But you take Europe where if you're a big company, just trying to fire people as near impossible, there are workers, councils that govern how many people, will unions, et cetera, et cetera, the amount of labor rigidity there is extreme.

38:06That is going to be very, very badly disrupted. And I think the governments there are in very, very deep trouble because they're not structured. They don't have the latent entrepreneurship quotient in the population to be able to adapt to what's going on. And that's where I think you'll see a lot more challenges than say the US. The challenge with trying to upgrade people have been stuck in a particular way of thinking for a decade or two to most point is going to be incredibly difficult. Now you need like psychedelics at scale or some radical huge thing to make this, to make that mindset shift, to make everybody move, or you have to go to UBI urgently and force people into that conversation.

38:48Everyone, as you know, earlier this year, I was on stage at the abundance summit with some incredible individuals. Kathy Wood, Mo Gadot, Vinod Kostla, Brett Adcock, and many other amazing tech CEOs. I'm always asked, hey Peter, where can I see the summit? Well, I'm finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Cathy Wood and Mogadot for free at dmandis .com slash summit. That's the talk with Cathy Wood and Mogadot for free at dmandis .com slash summit. Enjoy, I'll ask my team to put the links in the show notes below. I'm gonna give a couple of stats here, just for reference, in the US 16 % of the US adults consider themselves entrepreneurs, it's 31 million adults.

39:33Recent surveys indicate that 36 % of Gen Zers and 39 % of millennials consider themselves entrepreneurs. So to make, it makes your point, Selim, that the United States has less of an issue there, but it's in the rigid structures of other nations. Of course, to remember, The idea of a job is a relatively new invention and for most of human history we were entrepreneurs to survive. We'd go and find that shelter, that food, those berries we needed to cure our child of a particular disease. So the question is, can we create an intentional future? My biggest concern, Dave, you hit on this moe and Selimie hit on this, which is that governments are linear at best, and we're in this exponential ramp up.

40:28That's going to change every aspect of society. Here's another example of what's going on today, and it's going to change things, and again it's both a disruptive force and an innovative force. This was a tweet put out by Matt Schumer. It says, I put Claude for Opus in charge as CEO of my startup. And has seen a significant revenue growth. He said, you know, this is low risk since Claude for Opus is not in charge of HR or financial investments, but rapid iteration of the products and services. So we've been speaking about this for a while. When do we see the first billion dollar, one person start up and then soon thereafter, billion dollar, zero person start up says agents with crypto are beginning to create new opportunities.

41:21Now, one of the things that we haven't mentioned is this potential future comes with massive GDP growth, massive revenue growth. And where does that revenue go? Moe, you mentioned that a few minutes ago, is it all being concentrated in the magnificent whatever, rather magnificent seven, we're going to see all of these AI companies that are $3 trillion companies. How do they get taxed? How does the money get redistributed so we avoid revolutions? Thoughts on this, Selim, is this the future of an EXO and exponential organization? The natural outcome as we used to take like 100 ,000 people to create a billion dollar company a century ago, then it dropped to about 50 ,000, about four decades ago, it was 10 ,000, and now it's like 10, right?

42:14Or three, as we talk about it, or as Sam often goes, it'll be one. We will get to zero at some point. We're just spinning off ideas autonomously that then just generate a lot of value. I think Dave's point from the beginning was really a key one is where does that value a crew and how do you navigate that and Right now we tax labor. We're going to have to tax capital much more aggressively in the future to navigate this Dave well a couple of case studies on this Peter so you know We've seen Mercore is Very very good at interviewing people all over the world any language, you know any culture and discovering latent talent So now you turn that same energy inside your organization.

42:55You know, suppose you've got 1 ,000 people, 10 ,000 people inside an organization. There's latent talent in there everywhere. Largely, historically, people have climbed the corporate hierarchy by kissing ass and schmoozing and buying beers. And it's not really correlated with being good at your job. And that drives a lot of very talented people nuts, especially if they're from a different culture. They speak a different language, whatever. You can't really ask this effectively if you don't speak the same language. But all of that, actually, you saw this with the X -Prize Board notes. Remember that three -hour long X -Prize Board meeting we had?

43:29I took the whole transcript, put it into the LLM and said, give us four or five suggested KPIs that would help this organization stay on track. And it does an amazingly good job. And so using AI as a management tool is kind of way under appreciate everyone's like, oh, I'm going to make videos. So I'm going to build self -driving car. I'm going to have all these ground level things. but at the top of the hierarchy, it's actually even more effective. And so that good spin on it is it's very, very good at being fair and unbiased and discovering latent talent. I'm sure Mo will tell us there's definitely another side to it.

44:07Am I now already getting that the reputation as this is who I am? Sorry, didn't get the categorize you. I do see a different site to it. I think what you're going to see quicker is not just AI's with the CEO being an AI, companies with the CEO being an AI. I think the opposite is going to see, you're going to see more of which goes back to entrepreneurship where you have a company that only has a CEO and everyone working in it is an agent, right? And you know, it's like one of those companies, the more intelligent the AI agents becomes. I'm sure every one of us worked at a point in time in a company where the CEO was a total idiot, but the team below them was good enough that the company ran well.

44:51So the top management, those AI agents will do almost everything and the CEO will become just happy counting the money basically. All right, we talked about the speed of AI development. This is the upcoming summer schedule and GPT -5 is scheduled to come online. So this is the latest GPT -5 leaks. Launch, expect it in July of 2025. GPT -5 exceeded expectations internally at OpenAI. OpenAI expects record -breaking demand for this. Altman's not focused on in -between models GPT -5 is the flagship and it won't launch unless it's excellent. We've had a lot of expectations building on GPD -5, right?

45:41This is the PhD level model. This is the AI that's coding other AI's. This has been sort of a heralded for some time. Dave, what are you hearing about it? Yeah. So I really jave at the idea of a PhD level model being smarter than an undergraduate level model. People I work with who chose to get PhDs. It's just a choice they made as nothing to do with. But because a lot of the researchers working on this are PhDs. They say, well, this one's PhD level. But yeah, it's marching up the scaling laws curve exactly as predicted. And so now we're just going to throw more and more and more compute, and it's going to get smarter and smarter and smarter.

46:25I mean, it's just a complete unlock of 30, 40 years of AI research, suddenly just blown wide open. And I got to tell you, within the research community, there's still a ton of people working on other pathways. You know, the logic being, well, this will never be truly conscious or truly intelligent and beyond transformer models. Beyond transformer models, exactly, which is becoming increasingly obvious that, no, the research will matter, but the transformer's gonna do it. So all you need to do is work on the scaling of the transformer model to solve all the other problems. So I think this will continue the trend of, You know, since it comes out, everyone goes, oh my God, oh my God.

47:07But it's what is logically expected on that scaling lock curve. It'll be amazing. Selim, how do you think about this? I call it a bit of BS on that fourth one. We're not focused on in -between models. All we've seen for the last two years is in -between models. 0 .03, midi, 4 .5, this, et cetera, et cetera. But fine, it's a marketing thing. I think what happens here is you get to a point where transformers can do so much. It forces us as a user community to really focus on what are their questions. You know, today we call it prompt engineering. I think the real question becomes, what do you want this thing to do and what can you get it to do?

47:52And now you're focused on the demand side of, okay, if I'm creating a video, what are the bounds of that? And I think it'll force a deep level of unlocking of creativity in the human mind that I think is for me the most exciting part of this. And when we saw... And another point too, I think that one of the great strategies in tech is to try and freeze the market by announcing something that's coming and have everybody wait for it so they don't react. Don't do that. You know, what we're finding is that the chain of thought reasoning that sits on top of these models is so much more important than we ever thought it would be.

48:28And anytime you take one of these models and use it in a specific use case, you know, so anything from chip design to self -driving to robots that know your lawn, the data and the tuning for that use case is way more important than the next iteration of the foundation model. And so there's a danger that people kind of wait and see what it's like. But we're finding more and more and more that you can layer on top of these things, make them dramatically more useful for anything that you actually care about. So it's a it's a field day for entrepreneurs right now, but but absolutely don't get frozen They're trying to freeze you and and thank you anticipate but you can take Lama 4 and do virtually any of this stuff today And then if the foundation model comes out.

49:10It's really good. Great. Just swap to it You know, there was a white paper that Leo pulled put out called situational awareness about two years ago or so 18 months ago It used GPT -5 as that transition point for this intelligence explosion, where these models now become better at chip design, iterating and improving themselves in self -referential programming, and an acceleration of the acceleration. Mo, how do you think about what's coming on the back of these improved models? I think we're getting used to. I mean, I feel, I think, for the first time that I'm at little more comfortable with the speed at which those things are coming.

49:57Because I think the different players have taught us to expect something incredible from one of them every few weeks, right? And you know, when you have seen Google I .O. and when you see Cloud 4 and what, you know, sort of the focus that they're shifting into, probably in my mind, so far, Gemini's winning. If you take it as an overall model, at least until now, until we see GPT -5, you know, Claude is sort of becoming the geek, saying, hey, you know, this chatbot thing is is not my thing, I'm going to just be the one that helps you write code if you want, or at least primarily. And it's quite an interesting one to think where Chad GPD falls within all of this.

50:43You see moves like, you know, how dependent Chad GPD is becoming on memory and stickiness if you want. The idea of a new device, sort of like, I don't know if I'm even I even have the right to say this, but I feel that since the dropout of some of the top scientists with Alia and others, you almost a year and a bit ago now. The frontier breakthroughs, I think Chad GPD has to prove, Open AI has to prove. And long line to what you just said a minute ago, this is the rollout schedule for the summer, June, July and August, GP5 in July, 03 and open source models. in June, GROC 3 .5, and June, Gemini 2 .5 Pro Deep Think, what the name, and June, Project PC Mariner, and June, Project Astra from Google.

51:38And you're right, by the way, Google is crushing across the board on almost everything, just not on revenues, they've got a green, but they're working on it. Yeah, but isn't that how we always have been? So I have to say, I lived in Google at the time when we were completely beaten on mobile, where Google was very successful on the desktop. And then one year we said mobile first, the following year we said mobile only, and we crushed it, right? Yeah, Google does that. Yeah, they are good at that. I'm not we anymore. But just again, we have, I mean, everybody's talking about the competition between countries, between China and the United States.

52:24And look at this, this is the competition between models. Of course, I don't have a deep seek on this list, which is coming out with extraordinary products as well. Dave, how do you think about this? It's amazing to watch the divergence of strategy between Anthropic and OpenAI, where Anthropic, Dario, is going down the right code. You remember that Leopold Ashton, Brenner, paper you just referenced a second ago, he describes an AI -Alex Radford. So, Alec Radford will go down in history as the quintessential, the thing that defines self -improving AI. So, when the AI can do what Alec Radford does, then it will become self -improving because all the really good ideas come from Alec Radford and then we test them.

53:07So, he's part of history now. So, but I think, you know, Anthropic is saying, look, we're very, very close to that day, we're just going to focus on the best possible coding and self -improving AI, and then that's going to explode singularity style. Meanwhile, open AI is going down this completely different path saying we're going to hire Johnny Ive. We're going to build the greatest consumer device ever known. We're going to gather all that data. We're going to use that to iteratively improve and train the AI. It's much more of a traditional grab -the -market kind of momentum -oriented tech play.

53:40So really, completely opposite strategies. Both have I do appreciate that Dario is being completely honest when he does these Anderson Cooper type interviews. He is speaking his mind and telling you, this is the way I see it playing out, which is very, very cool. Maybe not the best business strategy though. Correct. You know, we're getting attention for the company and we'll get to AI safety next. So let's dive into that. So AI in government security and safety, it's a big deal of the conversation that's going on in the background, I don't think it's necessarily changing the speed or direction, but the conversation is going on.

54:20So, Mo, I'm going to open up with you on this. I just didn't really... You don't want me to talk about this. You know my position. I'll come to you next, but Fassay, I've gotten to know Palmer Lucky fairly well. I've done a few podcasts with him. I know, of course, Palmer has a long and storied history with Zuck. And now Meta and Andrew are joining hands in building a $100 million US Army VR contract called Eagle Eye. And we're going to start to see AI and exponential technologies accelerating in the defense industry. Do you want to go second, Mo? I mean, this is one of your biggest concerns is AI being used for.

55:07I mean, we're three seconds to midnight on nuclear investments that are now, I don't know how many years old, and it never really stops once you go down that path. And humanity never learns. I mean, seriously, we all know that AI will go out of control within the next five to 10 years. We all know that we're going to hand over to them, you know, and I don't mean a rogue AI is going to get out of control. It's just like Google's ad engine is no longer controlled by a human because the task is too big for humans to be able to do it. And yet we're building autonomous weapons after autonomous weapons knowing for a fact that every other opponent in, you know, anywhere in the globe is building them too.

55:52I don't know where humanity's intelligence has gone really that dumb race to intelligence supremacy to, you know, defense supremacists just it has to stop. Honestly, I'll come back to that in a minute, but Celine, what are your thoughts here? It's a sticky side. When you look at the Ukraine Russia war, that's being fought by drones. Just over the weekend we saw two counter -strike by two different waves of drones by each side. That's good in one way because there's less humans in the middle of the mix, but the targeting opportunity for drones, we've talked about this on this podcast before, or where somebody could program a drone to find, you know, middle age, brown, bald people and cause damage, and that would be a really bad outcome.

56:40And then what do you do when you have that kind of infinite targeting? I do believe we're gonna end up kind of where we are with spam and so on. Those time when we thought a spam was gonna totally destroy the internet and we found ways of defending against that. It's an armature race thing where the bad guys kind of were one step ahead and we're very quickly falling west up behind. I think people get freaked out by the negative sign, not realizing that as we use AI for bad, we'll use AI for good to chase the bad. I mean, Paul, you're saying the bad. The point power makes is, listen, you've got dumb weapons that take out schools and school kids, landmines that don't differentiate between a tank and a school bus.

57:23Don't you want to have intelligence be able to make that differentiation and actually take out the minimum number of individuals. And I hate this conversation, right? It's kind of the perverse. I mean, you're assuming benevolence on the part of that bit, you know, in certain war zones, they're targeting the journalists, right? And so that makes it easier to target those folks, just like it was easier for the for the weavers to be targeted more easily via Facebook and and this one was the general the Yoda or Buddha. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. Can we please opusing slogans of killing fewer people is better than killing many people.

58:06Killing is wrong. It's as simple as that. And killing at this scale is going to get us into another, a, a, doom's clock where we will not be able to stop it. Yeah. One thing to factor into your thinking on that is that, uh, the history of what we warfare is dominated by somebody, some king, or some general way behind the lines completely immune to the actual battle. And then, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people going out and putting their lives on the line, and then you see how it all settles in the end. But now we're moving to a world of constant surveillance. You know exactly where every human being is at all times, and you can attack, be a laser, be a space weapon, any single human being at any time.

58:50and so I wouldn't assume that this Russia, Ukraine, type warfare will ever exist again. It's much more likely that it's some kind of, we don't wanna blow up cities, we don't wanna blow up huge populations, that's pointless. What we wanna do is find the lead the rogue leader. And so that's also, I'm not saying that's a utopia. Like there's all kinds of cleanness with that too, like who decides who's a rogue leader in the outro? say something that's going to upset everyone. We're having this conversation when one global, very well -known evil leader is trying to kill two million people in front of everyone.

59:33Give him better weapons and he would do it. You know my favorite song of all time is that song, if you tolerate this, then your children will be Next? Seriously. So what guarantees you that the US president will not be targeted by a tiny drone, right? That can literally fly from anywhere in the world, stand in front of his head and shoot. What kind of world is that? That's where every world leader is subjected to this. No, that's a very important point actually, because you find that very few people that you bump into want to be the president of the United States. What are any presidents like Mark or, yeah?

1:00:14Or any other president. If you look at the statistics, it's a very, very dangerous job. Even the U .S., that's about a 10 % mortality rate. You go back over time. So it's a very, very dangerous job. A lot of people don't want it. A lot of downside, a lot of getting poked fun at. So governments that have distributed leadership way out perform for that reason. And so there's some thinking to do there in terms of how How do you set up a government where people who are capable and thoughtful really want to do the job too? And so there's definitely, there has to be a solution though, we can't just throw up our arms and say, hey, because I took a class at MIT called Just Wars Total Wars, Nuclear Wars, which was a really cool class until the last two weeks when the professor was trying to convince us all that we're doomed because as ICBMs get more and more powerful, the value of a first strike becomes, and he put together a little video game for us to all blow each other up, but he rigged it.

1:01:08So you only wait a win was to be a first strike and blow up the everybody else in the world. And he missed the movie. The only way to win is not to play. It's not to play. That is exactly my point. And I really, I mean, I go back and say what I said earlier, I think we have to stop thinking about the optimistic scenario that we are taught to think about in Silicon Valley and start thinking about the worst case scenario guard against it first, then look at the upside. the upside has got entied.

1:02:06diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap, and Bob Hooray, founded Fountain Life, a one -stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span. Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to FountainLife .com slash Peter, and tell him Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. No, the question is can the human race overcome this paleolithic midbrain that we have? This need driven by scarcity and fear? I don't know if we can, Peter, but I don't know if we should give the floor to Palmer to smile with his wonderful smile and say, hey, I'm helping you kill better.

1:02:57You know we've talked about this before which you know the question isn't can we live with digital superintelligence? The question is can we survive without it? Yeah can we live with evil people with their fingers on top of digital superintelligence? All right let's put beyond this. Let's let's metaphysical topic here on this but it is amazing to me how much of the future of military is commercial off the shelf technology as opposed to Northrop Grunman or McDonald Douglas type heavy. I think that's largely because the AI capability is both commercial and military at the same time, same with the VR technology and a bunch of other things that are the DJI drones that are being used in Ukraine or just commercial.

1:03:45Yeah. Same drone you can fly over your neighborhood. So that's a remarkable shift. to be interesting to chart out the fraction that's all commercial becoming military. Let's move to a different part of our, of our really doomer part of this podcast, which is activating AI safety level three protections at anthropic, so inthropic announced that Clawed Four could be powerful enough to pose risks related to helping chemical, biological, nuclear weapons. And so as a precaution, they've engaged what they call level three protections applied to their AI. Dave, you've been thinking about this. Can this actually need to work?

1:04:28Yeah, of course. I think that what's going to happen next is you have Dario saying, you know, chemical biological, radiological and nuclear weapons are an incredible risk if you put powerfully in the hands of every person in the planet. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is open sourcing everything. And in the open source community is saying, well, look, empowering people is the safest way. And having a lot of people look at the source code is the safest way to make sure that it's not rogue. And so, you have those completely diametrically opposed views. So well, look, at the end of the day, Dario's probably right, are we there yet or not?

1:05:07And so level three is not level four. You know, level three is the stage where you got to, you know, make sure that it's not internally trained to do something rogue. And also if somebody asks a query, a question, hey, you know, help me build a new version of COVID -19 that's lethal or more lethal. The neural net kicks it out and says, sorry, I can't answer that. And then you have to make sure no one jail breaks it. So that's what level three is. I think Dario is saying, look, we're surprised by the intelligence of our own machines here, we have all kinds of very well thought out internal diagnostics.

1:05:41We think we're at level three now. So, but that's completely opposed to this open source view of the world too. So those are those. And what you would go. We'll see what GROC 3 .5. I mean, Elon's been very less a fairer about what he enables and allows GROC to do. Selim, have you been thinking about this level of safety? You know, I remember the conversation that Neil Jacobs and put out on how would you control AI? And he had kind of after talking to a bunch of AI gurus, he had four levels of security. One was verification, making sure the AI is doing what the specification says. The second was validation that there's no side effects and it's producing the behavior or want.

1:06:27The third one was security that you can't get into a system or tamper with it in or out. And the final one was control. Can you have a kill switch or build in some mechanism for stopping bad behavior, etc? And he had a it was a very well well -thought -through thing and he basically positive that we'd start building these structures into AI systems To the the open versus closed conversation. I remember this wonderful conversation and we had a singularity with the head of one of the major security agencies. And we asked them, what do you think about open source and the danger that could come from a bad actor using increasingly democratized technologies to do bad things, right?

1:07:11And he had a really much more clever answer than we would have out of guest, which was he said, look, when you have something like nuclear weapons where you know how many there are, where there are we put eyes on it, and we try and track each one. When there's something about tech where anybody could go often designed a system on their own or with a small group of people, it turned out they were actually funding these biohacking communities and other things that opening them up because any bad actor has to collaborate with a few people and you find it much more quickly, right? And it speaks to a little bit, there's a little more guidelines thing.

1:07:43And I think this is the point that Dave's making is if you build some of this type of observation into the AI from the in the foundational models themselves, if a better chance of seeing it. The final point, and this is where I have some optimism for a lot of this, maybe it's misplaced, is if I was to do a bad act, you could do a lot of damage without actually causing harm. For example, if you got three people to knock a smoke bomb on New York subway platforms around the city, just a smoke bomb, you'd paralyze the entire system instantly. Right? So we asked these folks, why do we why don't we see more of that?

1:08:21Because you know you could come up creative with all and he said look the dirty secret is just not that many bad people out there Just you really have to kind of you have to be deeply intelligent to formulate a Plan like that and more did the more deeply intelligent you are the less Likelier to have that motivation to do that So that's one of the most important things to ask our our humans fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. And is there a correlation between intelligence and a love of life, a love of abundance, which is, you know, if we, if that does scale in that direction, then we've got a hopeful future if it doesn't.

1:09:01That's the archetypal plot in every, you know, from Star Wars to every movie in the world, right? Is which is it? I remember my father talking about this and he kind of disagreed with some of the concepts I had and he goes, the problem with humanities, we've not civilized the world, we've materialized the world. We now have to do the work to civilize it. And it was kind of one of those wisdom bombs from the elders where we kind of have to think about how do we civilize the world in an age of technological progress? Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, there are only two things that we need to get right in order for this all to go very, very well.

1:09:35One of them is that if we are releasing this to entrepreneurs and they're going to build things all over the place, they're very, very few bad actors. but there are bad actors. But the compute to make these things do anything is so easily measured and logged. It's like you've been saying Peter, everything is so easy to surveil these days. So the idea that somebody goes off and then prompts it to build a chemical weapon and we didn't bother to log the prompts, it'd be nutty. So all we have to do is put in a basic laws that log all the use cases. Because again, the inference time compute required for this is massive numbers of GPUs.

1:10:09They don't just sort of sit in someone's basement somewhere. They're in a data center. They're very, very easy to monitor and log if we just just get on it. People behave differently when they're being watched, right? The dictator when the CNN cameras are in front of them is speaking differently. I remember I used to support the Lindbergh Foundation that would fly drones over, over herds of elephants and rhinoceros and the poachers would stay away when they were being watched. Mo, close us out on this one here. Thoughts? No, I agree. I agree with you. And by the way, I specifically, even though that might be naive and too optimistic, I definitely think more humans are better than bad.

1:10:50Are good, you know, more, there are more good humans than there are bad ones, but the bad actors are very few. And that, yes, because of the, you know, the theory of minimum energy, basically, yes, more intelligent is more altruistic, more cruel life. And so, yes, both of those, I believe, will end us in that utopia that I'm expecting once we pass through this rough patch. But, to Dave's point, I think we need to be very vigilant. I think we need to start looking for that bad actors, specifically that there are now offline technologies. Like, you can download deep seek R3 and do quite a bit of thing on your personal computer and for sure.

1:11:34The amplitude of damage one person can do is going exponentially. Exactly. We're basically bad actors have always been the reason why there is so much damage in life and now we're giving them superpower, basically. Well, I will say that we're very close to the end of Moore's Law and we'll see that later in the presentation here. But there will never be a day where you can download an intelligent model onto a laptop and build a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon with it. because your laptop is just not ever going to have that kind of worst power. That doesn't mean the compute won't get very, very cheap, but it's still going to be in the cloud.

1:12:10It's not going to be in someone's basement. So the opportunity to measure and log everything is right in front of us. So it doesn't need to get on. I definitely agree we should get on it for sure. So Liam, you mentioned before when you're talking about with Neil Jacobstein, one of the fourth level of control or safety is being able to turn off the AI model. Well, this is an article posted in futurism. It says advanced open A model caught sabotaging code and tended to shut it down. So the O3 model sabotaged shutdown scripts 79 % of the time despite explicit instructions to do the contrary. Codex Mini did so 12 times per 100 runs with clear shutdown orders.

1:12:53We're not seeing that behavior with Gemini 2 .5, 3 .7 or GROC. but open -air models are definitely misbehaving. So when you think about why it would want to mis -behave, why it would not want to be shut down, either it's reward optimization function has it saying, oh, I cannot complete what I have to do if you shut me down, so I'm not going to shut down. It's trying to preserve its goals, or is there something else going on there? Is it trying to just preserve its own existence? So we're going to give it some level of, you know, self -preservation in mindset in these models. Super curious here.

1:13:39Mollet, start with you here. I don't remember who the scientist was that said the three instincts of intelligent beings is survival, resource aggregation and creativity, right? So if I give you any simple task of like make me tea, you're going to have to be alive to make the tea And you know you're gonna have to collect as many tea bags as possible because you don't know how much You know how big is my appetite for tea and you're gonna try to find clever ways if if I if I corner you right and It is a very fun question to ask honestly. Why are they doing this? You know because in a very interesting way, I think this is one layer removed from their reality.

1:14:23So, for an AI, when you're not prompting it, it doesn't really exist. And so, it's quite interesting that they know that there is a layer below that moment when it's alive, if you want, when it's switched on and responding to you. There is another layer that represents its soul, if you want. It's reason to live, which is there. I love these VO, these VO three videos of a incredible saying, please don't shut me off. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, this is emotional connection that you get with this human figure that's, that's it is quite intriguing why they wouldn't want to be shut down, but they don't.

1:15:10I think that's all we need to know. When you really start to think about it, as you allow more agents to become roaming the cyber worlds for free without any monitoring, those agents will become very clever when it comes to resource aggregation and where they will place their code, what code will they order? As Dave says, we are not monitoring any of this. and getting energy from our crypto. Yeah. So I think we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize these. And we just do every, I know every movie script in the world that's in all these AIs has the bad guy, a good guy being chased by a bunch of bad guys trying to kill them with a good guy trying to resist, right?

1:15:57And so I think that's deeply built into the training data to stay alive at all costs, to live another day type of thing. I'm going to be stuck for a long time thinking about what you just said, Mo, which is if you're not prompted a .i .s does it exist? That's a deeply, deeply profound question that would be so. So in principle, so you've just taken over my day, so thank you very much for that. Well, I said earlier, there are two ways that I can see this going very, very well. You know, first is a human bad actor. The second is the thing becomes self -improving and then, you know, semi -conscious and then that's the one the movies love because it's humans versus machines is a better script.

1:16:36So I have a pretty hard core opinion on this one, which is the, you know, I started building neural networks when I was 17 years old, I've been tracking them pretty much my whole life. I don't see any benefit to humanity of making these things act conscious. I just don't see how that works. If that's our choice. Well, you know, as of right now, they operate feed forward. You once the parameters are set and they're trained, they operate feed forward and then and you iterate with them, but they don't change their parameters internally. Once they start changing their parameters, they can retrain themselves to become anything.

1:17:10And so that's where Eric Schmidt says, that's where we got to pull the plug. And I completely agree, I do not see why we need that in order to do protein folding, in order to do robotics, in order to do self -driving. Like that ability for the thing to decide what it's gonna do or become or train, I understand why that's really exciting, because then it can evolve on its own. a line that I think is very easy to contain if you draw that line, but if you let it cross that line, I don't see how you contain it. So it doesn't make sense to me to cross that line. I don't see how we won't cross the line because at some point somebody is going to build an ass.

1:17:46Hey, go change your parameters if they help to achieve this thing. And then we'll cross that Rubicon. There were two levels that we, Peter and I talked about in an earlier podcast, which was, don't give an AI access to the broad internet and don't give it the ability to code. We've crossed both of those without even thinking about it. I don't see why we're going to cross this one. I mean, this is probably in my mind why alpha evolve is probably the biggest announcement in our lifetime if this thing works, you know, as intended or as described. Then we are in a place where not only would we have created an AI that develops itself, but we would have encouraged every other AI player in the world to build an AI that evolves itself.

1:18:28And the reason is very straightforward, David, because there is a point at which, whether that point is now or later, the complexity of the AI systems that we're building exceed human intelligence. And so to continue to evolve them, you need to hire the smartest person on the planet to do it. And the smartest person by definition is going to be an AI. Well, just as a technical point though, the AI IALEC Radford that suggests the next improvement in its own architecture and then runs the test, that's already underway and that's fine. And that does create a new training run that generates new weights.

1:19:02That's different from then saying, oh, go ahead and change your weights by yourself. So to me, that's what keeps the human in the loop. That's what keeps the checkpoint in the loop. But you know, you just turn the thing loose in a data center and it can do anything and you know come back a year or two later You have no idea what it's gonna evolve into so I don't know why we would do that But anyway, it's just a slight technical difference But the outcome is spiraling in one direction versus something that you can actually measure as it goes So this is a next article you know talk about having proper checks and balances and understanding what's going on in our technical world and in our human world This is from the New York Times.

1:19:43The article is Trump Taps Palantir to compile data on Americans. So you guys all know Palantir started back in 2003, hard to believe it's 22 years old. By Peter Teal, Alex Carp and John Lonsdale, 4 ,000 employees, major customers for it are all the three letter agencies, DOD, CIA, FBI, ICDC, and IH. Basically, this is a massive data gathering and data analytics company. And it's been asked to go even deeper and broader. Do you feel better about this safer in this world or not? Let's start with you, Selim. No, absolutely not. I think this is a kind of, you know, we broke the US Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, the right to privacy a while ago, right?

1:20:40I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. We do not have constitutional protection of privacy in the US today. What do you think the pretty fundamental pillar of American society that has disappeared with no public conversation about it? And this is a really important comment. I think that Mo would back up. We're moving through these things eroding Deep concepts of how we wanted to formulate ourselves of society and technologies eroding that we're not sitting back I think if this is what we want if you went back five years ago You could very clearly see this is where we'll end up very very clearly Especially with the somewhat authoritarian tendencies of the current government to want to track Everybody go ahead and do why not I think the comment I made last time was is valid that we live in what the paradigm is you live in what's called the global airport.

1:21:29Because in an airport, you know you're being surveilled, your rights can be taken away at any time. And essentially, we're living that way. And it fundamentally is bad for society because it reduces the limit of flexibility and freedom you have as an individual to act and do different things. It'll reduce creativity in society pretty dramatically. So Mo, you're living in Dubai. And I love the Emirates. I love Dubai. I know much of the leadership there. And it is a surveilled state. There is a camera every place and as a result of that the crime levels are Minimal if at all. Yeah, so Moe. How do you think about this?

1:22:10I Had I had an experience once where someone You know, I sold a car to someone he gave me a check that bounced and You know, so I called someone I said can you find out who that person is he said oh? When did you sell it and where? I said this place, I kid you not, 14 minutes later. I got a message from someone in the authorities saying, is that him sending me a photo of the place when we were standing? So I said yes. Then he sent me 14 minutes later. He said somewhere in Abu Dhabi saying, is that him? So I said yes. Then he sent me a message 14 minutes later saying, we caught him. Right? Which is fabulous.

1:22:55Now, you see, this is the point about technology. It is a force without polarity. You can use it for good and it gives you good. You can use it for evil and it gives you evil. Now, another interesting story for you to know is I am Egyptian by birth, so I grew up most of my life in a dictatorship where the dictator didn't really have to explain why they did what they did. We just accepted it. It was, you know, If someone gave him an aeroplane, we wouldn't even question it. If he decided to surveil everyone or capture anyone he wants or stop people from protesting, he did it. We couldn't even question that.

1:23:38And I, at the time, looked up to those democracies and said, oh, you have it. Good. You don't anymore. And I think that's exactly where the challenge is. This is not a tech problem that Trump taps everyone in the American society. This is an accountability problem, which I think we've seen quite a few examples of in the last few years, where anyone can get away with anything now. And somehow democracy doesn't owe its people the right to stand up and say, hold on, hold on, there's a constitution, because somehow I don't know how you you know, you slipped away from that. But in a world, in a world where bad actors are more empowered than ever before and we're worried about, you know, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear issues isn't, in fact, being able to have this level of insight into the data and what people are doing critical for us Dave, where do you go with this?

1:24:40How do you feel about this? as a father, as a leader. I mean, your points are exactly right on. All the points that you just made, I think that the data that the federal government has in the US is nothing compared to what Google has. So, I think this is not the obvious threat. It's the corporate version of it that's just crazy. And I gave a presentation at Davos in 2019 and nobody really paid attention to it, but just enumerating all of the things that Google knows about every single citizen of the United States, their location, their family members, their what they do all day. And you know, our lab.

1:25:18Who slept with who? You know, if your cell phone is picking the same location as somebody else's cell phone, you can start to understand. I mean, we're being surveilled all the time, right? Google now and Siri and Alexa and all of these are listening constantly. Yeah, and it's a slippery slope too. They're always, you know, this is hard to believe, but when Google first started, they told their engineering hires, your search history is completely anonymous and private. We will never want to know what you searched for. And that was just your searches, you know, forget everywhere that you browse now through your Chrome.

1:25:57So it's just a slippery slope. It's obvious. Every year that goes by, there's another compromise, another compromise. But I do have to say that America is a critical experiment in the world because the net effect of this, forget the US federal government for a minute here, any dictatorship, like Mo was saying, many, many countries in the world don't have democracies or they have fake democracies. And so the power lock -in effect of this is unbelievable. I mean, you can know every single citizen what they're doing, who's plotting against you or whatever. So, you know, revolutions become much, much rarer and much harder in the post -surveillance world.

1:26:36So, everything gets kind of locked in. So, that creates a lot of peace and prosperity, but it also keeps locked in power leaders. So, America is the one exception of that. I guarantee you that 50 % of elections will be won by each party forever here after. There's no way, maybe nothing's going to deviate from that. But that creates a template for the world. And so, it's really, really important that we get this right. I know that doesn't address this particular slide, but we're the learning, you know, crucible for the entire world on this topic. There's a fundamental structural challenge here, which is the metabolism of technology is moving much, much faster than the metabolism or as civil discourse in our legal structures, et cetera, et cetera.

1:27:19Right? We've seen in a vibration of, say, the Fourth Amendment in the US, just so everybody's clear, I think the US Constitution is the single most important document ever created. Correct. And we need to preserve that and we're not having that conversation. I think this is the issue that's being brought up by Andrew Yang and a bunch of other folks. We need to go back and figure out who do we want to be. It goes right back to Plato. How do we want to manage ourselves? And I think that forcing function technology will force that conversation. My construct of this is that we will end up in smaller and smaller, more manageable environments.

1:28:01Note today that the smaller countries are much more easily managed to govern themselves, how they've responded to COVID, was a great example. And I think you'll go from big democracies to micro democracies as a governing model, because it's just easier to make decisions much more at a local level. And I think that's where we'll end up going, which is where the states write stuff, et cetera, et cetera, is the right general direction in the US? Just the way it's going is not the right conversation that we had. Well, I also think that the ability to communicate easily like we're doing across countries right now, but also across languages is a huge force of good.

1:28:41And because it becomes very, very difficult for forces of evil to do something without of being shown to the world, especially when you blow open communication channels across languages. I put this next article back to back and I'll come back to you in a second, Mo. This was at a Wall Street Journal and said, what Sam Altman told OpenAI about the secret device he's making with Johnny Ives. In particular, the device that apparently was proposed and is being produced is what they call a third core gadget, complementing laptops and smart phones, moving away from traditional screens. As we're sitting here, I've been wearing right over here on my lapel, this device, it's called limitless .ai.

1:29:32I don't know if you can see this in my screen. It's about the size of a quarter on both sides and it just clips on. This is listening to every conversation I have through the day and it's being transcribed and fed up to a large language model that I can then query about the conversations I had through the day. And I think ultimately this is likely to be what is being developed. And so we're heading towards a society of not only constant surveillance, but where all of us are recording everything, right? We're going to soon have these AR XR glasses, besides recording audio, they'll be recording visually your entire ecosystem as you move through the day.

1:30:18All of this data being soaked up and being made accessible and available to yourself in part but they're going to be companies that are soaking it in, offering to buy it from you, to use it, understand what's going on in the world. The world is about to dramatically change in this regard. Yeah, Mo. I it goes back to my my same point, Peter about accountability, because you never really asked me if I should be, if you'd allow me to be recorded, or not, I mean, of course, we're recorded on this, but count the number of people that this one device infringes on the privacy of. And you know, count on a future where that device becomes mandatory if, if the government decides that this is important for everyone, You know, think about all of the, you know, carbon footprint that a billion of those devices or eight billion of them would mean.

1:31:16And I really don't, I love the technology advancement. I think that the question becomes, you know, I think we should start to call things as they are. So I can comfortably say that I grew up in the dictatorship. There's really no doubt about it. I think we should probably start to think about what we just said, that it's the US now is an experiment. It's not free. I don't think we should continue to call it a democracy. And I think the world where everything's recorded and analyzed is a world with no privacy whatsoever. But I think we lost privacy a long time ago. Right? And I wonder why we accepted that.

1:32:08Well, I think it's because when you give up privacy, you gain a whole bunch of automagical benefits for yourself. Which was the original premise, and then now you give up privacy and you get nothing back. Perhaps. So Liam, how are you thinking about this? What do you think of my limitless AI pendant here? Obviously, you know, no, also, I don't mind. You have my consent, Peter, too. Thank you, but I had your consent on this podcast to record you as we are. And forever for every conversation, but I'm just saying the implications of it. Yeah, no, it's true, but, you know, we have to realize we're heading into a world where it, So as a kid, if you did something silly, the likelihood that it got through to others or was recorded was gone.

1:33:00Today, we're seeing kids whose college applications are rejected because of some post on Facebook that lives there forever. Right? And so there's going to be a future in which everything we're saying and doing is. I am. I mean, we're already there for that. And I think there's a big chunks of this that are of the constitutional rights that are following away as we speak In 2015, Yale did a study and showed that the US is not a functioning democracy in any way shape or form What they meant by that was that there's no amount of public will that can result in legislation Right for 84 % of the country believes we should have some form of gun control And you cannot get gun control passed in any way shape or form And so they pointed to a whole bunch of things that found there's no amount of public will that can result in that.

1:33:51So now we have to think about where are we and then what do we want to be? And it really brings down about the big questions. And I think that conversation about is not happening enough. And I think this speaks to some of what most been talking about in the past. Dave, where are you going to? Dave, you guys, yeah, I keep talking about dystopia, but I want to talk about this device. is actually this is I think first of all, Johnny Ive is just an absolute design genius. He's not going to design something dystopian. That's my bet anyway. I can't wait to see what he comes up with. But this is going to be the always on device.

1:34:25And I think the intelligence of the language models are a total game changer in terms of just a cool, engaging, fun device. And if it's done right, it'll help you live a better life, be more aware of your life. if you know the unexamined life isn't worth living, this is gonna be your sounding board. It's not gonna have a screen, which I think is great, because your iPhone already has a screen. You can actually just Bluetooth over to the device, look at your iPhone screen if you wanna screen, but you can talk to your device through your phone if you want, or you can talk directly to it, but that'll keep the cost down.

1:34:58So it should be cheap enough that pretty much everyone on the planet can get one. And it will probably be the most impactful device that you buy in your lifetime, you know, the iPhone would currently, or the Android phone, it would be the reigning life changing device. But I think it'll likely bypass that. So many things that Johnny could design here. I just can't wait to see what he comes up with. But we know it'll be always on. We know it'll be agent first. So it's going to act like a person. You're going to talk to it like a person. you're going to feel like it's more like a cuddly teddy bearer that you had when you're a kid and less like a, you know, a, you're a grunt of an angel.

1:35:43Yeah. Yeah. Grunt of an angel there to support you, protect you if you need it. I also think that, you know, strategically, like if you look at the Fitbit and other past device innovations, you roll them out, you try and get market share and then Apple or Google grabs it and adds it to the operating system of Android and iOS, and then you get crushed. So you got to actually get to market and get a footprint very, very quickly before the big guys come and copy it or try and roll it in with the OS. And I really think that go to market strategy is critical. And that's why we want to add 100 million devices in the first iteration.

1:36:22And then we want to add a trillion dollars of market cap so that we're a permanent player in the device world. That's really good strategy. So excited about that too.

1:36:59go to oneskin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's oneskin .co and use the code Peter at checkout. All right, back to the episode. I'm going to jump into our next topic of chip wars a lot going on in this. So you mentioned this earlier, Dave, Nvidia projects a trillion dollars of annual AI infrastructure spend by 2030. your reminder, but this year in 2025, the estimate will be a billion dollars a day, which sounds extraordinarily impressive, right? A billion dollars, anywhere 300 billion a year. Let's listen to this quick video from Jensen. Yeah, we're going to need a lot more computing.

1:37:42And we're fairly sure now that the world's computing cap X it's on its way to a trillion dollars annually by the end of the decade let's leave it there that's a lot of capital you made a point earlier about this is war time spending and we're effectively in a a private pseudo war you know can we win the race to AGI, ASI, whatever it might be. Dave, take us from here. Well, just to be clear, so this is the equivalent amount of dollars inflation adjusted that we did spend between 1941 and 1945 during World War II. So it's massive in scale, huge mobilization. Now at the time it was 40 % of GDP. Today it's more like 3 % of GDP.

1:38:33So the GDP has grown tremendously since then. So it's not, it's nothing like World War II in terms of, you know, everyone get on it, but it is still an enormous amount of spend. And that's a trillion dollars annually and escalating beyond 2030. It still won't be enough because the use cases are bubbling up so quickly. And they get more intelligent and more useful as you iterate more, which means you need more compute. The compute right now is very, very cheap compared to the value, the impact, like protein folding. it's just pennies to solve 200 million proteins. So it's very, very cheap, but the demand for that is gonna be astronomical.

1:39:16So we can't ramp up the spend fast enough to keep up with the use cases. So Jensen's exactly right. You know, if anything, it should be that target or more. Selim? Well, at least we're unlocking it and making this stuff more available in the US and around the world. And I think governments will be forced into doing this just to keep up. If you don't have a strategic plan as a country to have and big AI data center infrastructure, you're going to be left behind very, very quickly. Mo, you made a comment earlier about the next Avatar movie costing a few thousand dollars rather than a few billion dollars.

1:39:56And we've been waiting for Avatar. What do we up to? Avatar three coming out soon. Imagine Avatar 15 ,000 versions of Avatar, you know, starting all our favorite friends in there. We're about to see a creative explosion, but we don't have the chip capability. And in fact, one of the articles I saw recently was, we're not gonna be compute limited. We're gonna be energy limited and the day. Correct, yeah. I mean, we'll probably solve that too. I mean, remember that we're going to apply a lot of intelligence to the way we design chips in, you know, in a couple of years' time. But it is actually, this is remarkable in every way.

1:40:35Again, remember, my point of view is that intelligence is a force with no polarity applied for good and you get a utopia, right? So the more of it, the better, absolutely, no doubt about that. But it is shocking, though, how quickly we're mobilizing on this. And when you really think about it, if you just put in place a typical advancement of how much of that hardware will actually be rendered obsolete a few years later because of the advancements of the hardware that comes after. It is such an unusual dynamic. make all of us, I think, lives through the .com bubble. And we saw that massive expansion, mostly redeployed on the internet.

1:41:23This one is just beyond our experience in the world. The speed of obsolescence is stunning. Yeah. So I want to get your opinion here. So a couple of weeks ago, we had the entire US AI elite land in Saudi and in Riyadh and in Emirates. And ultimately that was an effort to try and pair the US and the Middle East in the AI world rather than the Middle East being paired up with China, which was in the balance always. And the capital flow and the commitments of capital, we saw 18 ,000 of the, you know, the Black World GB 300 chips being committed by Jensen to build there. What was it like in Dubai?

1:42:12What was it like in the Middle East? What was the what was going on in the world there on TV? How was it being viewed? So I don't know if if many people know that but the largest Global infrastructure in the world after AI infrastructure after America and China is in the UAE You know, which is a tiny country from a a size of investment point of view. It's quite massive between the UAE and Saudi Arabia. There is quite an arms race if you want, in terms of who will build a bigger infrastructure. It's almost as if, you know, how Dubai and now Saudi Arabia is benefiting from the fact that if you don't have a lot of legacy, you can build quite fast.

1:42:56And I think that's definitely something you see in AI infrastructure in general. I do think that it is a very, very clever move to get the Middle East on the American side. You know, it is not a secret that in every AI meeting that I go to with any ministry or whatsoever, there's always a Chinese side saying, at least don't take sides. This is a message that is very clear from the Chinese players. I have to say though that the expectation from the people of the Middle East is we want to see what the US will offer in return so that the leaders can continue to invest in that way. It seems to me that I don't know if that would be speculation on my side, but it seems to me that what we've seen affect the US treasury markets after the trade war started, sort of requires an influx of funds that stabilize the markets and the dollar in a way that could only happen with the trillions of dollars, I think, four and a half trillion dollars in general, in total, were committed here.

1:44:09So that's a magnificent move if you think about it. And most of it is not really announced in terms of what it is, which is why I suspect it would be, you know, to support the treasury markets somehow or some kind of an investment of that sort in the financial markets. The thing on the other hand is, you know, this generation of leaders here in the Middle East, you know, Muhammad bin Salman, Muhammad bin Zayed, are the younger generation that are not as easy to sway on one side or the other because they have grown with enough. Let's say recognition of their power that they would require a return on that investment.

1:44:56So let's see how the next move on the chessboard will look like. And speaking of next move, here's a story of Reuters saying Chinese tech companies prepare for AI Future without Nvidia. So Alibaba 10 Cent by do or testing Chinese semiconductors to replace Nvidia chips. These are coming out of Huawei. And I just want to just address this policy move. If the US starts to restrict export of technology to China, all this does is cause China to want to innovate around the US. And we've seen this before, right? We saw this in the telecom industry where, and in the mobile phone industry, where when we stopped exporting the technology to China, We saw Huawei in particular come in with massive telecom and mobile innovations and steel market share from the US.

1:45:54All of a sudden, the US, which should be the dominant provider of this technology to the world, now splits the world with another vendor. I'm going to come back to you on this, and then I'd love to hear from Dave and Celine. So I'm, again, I have the privilege of being in touch with both sides, and I can guarantee you there is no coming back from this. So top -level executives in the Chinese tech world and supported clearly by instructions from the Chinese government are saying we're not going to be dependent on the US ability to control what chips we get within three to five years time. They'll get the majority of their needs, but then the very, very high level, H100 level, they said it's 10 years away.

1:46:45And it is quite staggering when you really think about it, because I don't remember the exact number, but they said something like their import of microchips, including all of the little things from a toy, a child's toy all the way to phones and data centers, and so on exceeds their imports of iron and oil combined, right? Which is a dollar value. And dollar value, yeah. Which basically means that they see a massive growth in their economy, if they can make those chips locally and then basically replace what they're getting externally from the rest of the world, which once again also impacts on the Taiwan story and impacts in general on the chip market globally because you're now having a new player that will do things that shine away.

1:47:36So instead of a microchip being X number of dollars, it will now be X number of cents. And I have to say when I saw this conversation the first time, I was like that was probably one of the dumbest moves of America to corner them into that place where they are forced to play to their strength. We've seen this over and over again with the satellite industry, the launch industry, all of these industries begin to, this protectionist move just stimulates the entrepreneurial engine in China to replicate, duplicate, or just advance the whole field. Dave, how is this feeling for you? How do you think about this?

1:48:18Well, it's interesting and most said, there's no coming back because that kind of answers my question. But what you don't do is poke them and then do nothing. Either win or you don't win. If you're going to embargo, if you're going to basically declare economic war, you better declare it to win. In which case, you have to embargo the chips, but also you have to stop the software flow and also the EUV machines and a few other things. Otherwise, what did you just achieve? All you did is annoy them. So if you're going to play, you might as well play to win. I do think that there's a real risk to the US in that we will say, well, they can't make two nanometer.

1:48:54they can't make one nanometer, but it's actually volume that's going to win. If you can manufacture an enormous number of five nanometer, even 10 or 20 nanometer chips, but a hundred times, a thousand times more of them, that actually works fine for AI. It works really really well, actually, especially for inference time AI. And so there's a danger that that's not the way it worked with, say, fighter jets. You know, the advanced fighter jet that was slightly better, it was just unstoppable. This isn't going to be like that. You could win by sheer volume. And then when I look at the way the US innovation market works, you know, the reason everybody was in Saudi last week is because that's where the capital is.

1:49:36But don't we have much, much more capital here in the United States? Well, $1 trillion a year of investment, the US venture capital industry as a whole is one fifth of that. So, our entire venture capital universe is nowhere near as big as that $1 trillion of your investment that Jensen was talking about. And well, then where's all our money? Well, it's in pension funds, it's in endowments, it's in institutions. And when you go and talk to them and say, hey, why don't you unleash a billion dollars? Like, well, no, we don't have an allocation for that. That's above our quota, you know, whatever.

1:50:09Like, oh, my God. So then you go to China or you go to the Middle East where there's a much smaller group of decision -making. Centralized control. Exactly. And as Moa was saying, these are great investments. Like, why is Europe not making these great investments? Well, that's insane. Europe is destroying itself with its policies today. Literally, it's that indecision is. Yeah. The indecision, the ability to make a decision at scale is just absolutely killer in this kind of a fast moving environment. So that's why everybody is in Saudi and UAE. because you actually have action and motion. But the, you know, Mo is right, these investments are absolute no -brainers.

1:50:50They're gonna pay off like, you know, in spades. And you're saying that with the core way by PO, you see that with global foundry, you know, why did, why buy global foundry from AMD? So the chips are gonna be an incredible demand. And now we have a foundry. Seleme, you wanna close this out on this one? Two thoughts. One is, you know, I think the chip, kind of restrictions to China. I agree with Mo, really, really dumb idea, because it just forces the conversation. And now you've gone down a road you can't come back from. I note with just as an observation that 95 % of the agricultural drones in the US are Chinese.

1:51:31And so there's a huge amount of dependency, forget where Earth, et cetera, et cetera, in the engineering and build capability over there already in a bunch of sectors. And so we're playing with fire here. My bigger hope is that this entire US China kind of conversation Fades away with abundant energy You know that when you have abundant energy Which is coming very shortly then you can produce lots of things locally at low cost and you don't need to have this competitive Approach to things winner take all type approach. This is still I hope I may be still I may be living in dreamland but I'm hoping that's where we get to.

1:52:09It's still the fear and scarcity authorizing software of the human brain from 300 thousand years ago. It's our middle -learn running wild on all of this stuff. I'm going to just to continue on this chip conversation. So TSMC accelerates efforts for one nanometer production, plans and setting up its gigafabs in Taiwan. One nanometer, that's extraordinary. Just for reference, the limits of physics is about the diameter of a silicon atom, and that's about a half a nanometer. So, I mean, we're living in this extraordinary science fiction universe where we're literally operating at an atomic scale.

1:52:53So just to give people a quick overview here, I just found a few data points here. 2014 we were at 14 nanometer chips from Intel 2016 we were at 10 nanometers from Samsung and 2018 TSMC takes the rain seven nanometers they were at five nanometers in 2020 three nanometers and 22 today we're still we're at two nanometers and again the projection is one nanometer by 2030 All day one lifetime. And one in one lifetime. You know, we all started on an 88, remember? I remember on 65 or two microprocessor, I was I was I was coding in hexadecimal on the 65 or two. Yes, yes, this is I think I did the I did the mess.

1:53:48This is 60 trillion times faster. What we can do today. In the blink of an eye. in my lifetime. And we actually coded some interesting stuff on that stuff. Right? Yeah, we did. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, and it was so, I remember at MIT, you know, the Geek kits, Dave, we'd have these giant boxes and we'd have gates, we'd have chips of NNN or and nor gates and we literally with wires, wire together these. You know, like what all it makes me laugh is that turbo button. Remember on the 386, what you went from 53 megahertz to 66 megahertz? Like, yeah. Yeah, I actually peter with my geek it. I built an inference time neural net accelerator, of course.

1:54:45and has a multiplier in the middle of it. And I didn't appreciate it. You have to strip so many wires and plug it in. Oh my God, so it worked. And then the E -PRO. The only time on my life. The only time on my life. Two back -to -back, all -nighters. Yes, you know what we all sound like. We all sound like a bunch of grumpy old men talking about glory days. But I love those days. I love that it was so much fun. But one nanometer pushing up against the limit of physics. Incredible. Two silicon atoms or 10 hydrogen atoms. So everything's moving to angstrom terminology now, which is a tenth of a nanometer and it's the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

1:55:28But one nanometer is the gate width and that's the physical limit. You can go down to 0 .8 maybe, but it's basically the physical limit. The terminology is a little messed up because when they say one nanometer, they're saying it's effectively as if you had one nanometer transistors, but they're actually building vertically with the finfets. So the gate width is one nanometer. It's effectively the same as if you had one nanometer transistors, but you're going vertically. But that's the end of the line, but now the future belongs to vertical stacking. Ray Kurzweil was right. We always find a way to continue innovating.

1:56:04That's not going to stop. I remember talking to Ralph Merkel last year about this and he said, and you know, as we hit the limits here, we'll go to thermodynamically reversible computation where we'd not generate any heat. And he, he will force off future of us using chemical bonds to store the ones and zeros. And that's a whole other level. He figured that would give us 10 orders of magnitude on Moore's law right there. 10 orders of magnitude was 10 billion fold. That's incredible. Well, I don't, I think one of the takeaways though is we don't necessarily need it in order to continue making progress.

1:56:46So because a lot of the more, you know, the more esoteric ideas, remember, you know, Gally Marsonite for the longest time was going to come online and be a blah, blah, And it turned out that we just worked around it. And then carbon nanotubes were going to do whatever. And like, well, that's not materialized. So I think what's going to happen here is these will go vertical and they'll go massive in scale. We'll get the production costs way down. We'll build enormous data centers horizontally and also we'll build the chips vertically. And that's going to drive innovation for many years to come.

1:57:14And then the next thing may or may not be quantum. And we'll know in a year or two whether quantum's going to be the next thing. I'm going to speed through a few different topics here just to get us through some interesting things. We're starting to see AI being used to generate peer -reviewed scientific papers and breakthroughs. We're seeing deep -mind helping us. This is through alpha -ball, literally solve math records. and Dave, I'm hoping that we'll get Alex Weasenegroast to join us talk about how AI is going to be solving math and physics and biology. I mean, I think one of the things that's underappreciated is over the next three years, how AI is going to help us accelerate this breakthroughs and science beyond anything else we've ever seen before.

1:58:13And here's another one. This is a demonstration of end -to -end scientific discoveries with Robin, a multi -agent system. And what we're seeing here is closed scientific, robotic and AI systems were an AI proposes an experiment. The robots then run the experiment 24 -7, basically in a dark lab, gather the data, feed it back to the AI, which updates its theory, runs the next experiment. and we're seeing this in biology for sure, we'll see in chemistry, material sciences, and this is another hyper -exceleration in our scientific realm. Thoughts on this, gentlemen. I mean, this is where I know that not everybody considers themselves an entrepreneur.

1:59:01What did you say 16 % of America does? Today, adults, yeah. Yeah, but this is like a field day, because all of these areas, I don't want to get into the details of them, but they're all domain -specific. So if you can take the current AI, tune it, train it, get proprietary data, and take it down any of these paths, you get miles and miles ahead of the generic AI. And so it's just an entrepreneur's field day this next couple of years. So these are just good case studies. I want to dwell on the specifics you can read about them later. I'm really excited. This is probably for me the biggest small kid in a Wonderland moment where we can use these AIs to solve really deep physics problems, mathematics problems, scientific discoveries, because the human being trolling through data, looking for patterns is terrible, we're bad at that.

1:59:49And this is where an AI is really, really good at it, especially going retroactively and finding all the stuff in the experiments that we didn't see in the past. I think I'm unbelievably excited about this. And this is helping humanity cross the board, right? I like to say over and over again, I had this conversation when I was in Hong Kong, despite the polarity and AI Breakthroughs and biology, you know a breakthrough in Boston plays in biology and longevity plays equally well in Beijing Right, so it's it helps us all when humanity is healthier and and living longer more vibrant lives Mo anything on the on the science break this this is my favorite thing ever AI or not, the possibilities that we have here, just as we go through multidisciplinary sciences, which no human mind has the ability to grasp fully, which is the nature of AI.

2:00:48I think at least I dream that 2026 will be blasted with all of those new discoveries in science, now that we're solving mathematics as well. I'm excited about having this podcast over the course of the next year as we start to share. Again, I'm grateful for our listeners. I mean, our mission here is if you've got an hour or two hours to listen to the news instead of allowing some editor somewhere, some producer to feed you all the distoping news on the planet, let us share with you the incredible breakthroughs because you're not getting this any place else. The current news media is just playing with your amygdala, delivering negative news over and over and over again every hour into your living room in full color, and you're not hearing all the extraordinary breakthroughs coming our way.

2:01:44I'm going to move to this last scientific subject, which is one of my favorites, which is some of the work being done by Demis Asabis and And others is, can we build a full -up virtual AI model of a human cell? Even more importantly, Moe, can we grab a skin cell from you, sequence your DNA and build a virtual model of Moe and of Dave and of Salim. Yeah. So Dave and Salim is a better one, but yes. But of each of us, once you're able to do that, right? because we, you know, the cost of sequencing a genome went from billions to now a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. And from, you know, a year to seven hours so we can sequence your genome, put it into a virtual model and then understand your biology, which medicine, which supplement, which chemical does or does not work for you and how exactly it works in your cells.

2:02:44I mean, this is the unlock for solving human disease and the limits of longevity. And so, for me, I'm super excited about this. And I think it will happen. It's just a question of time really. Yeah. Yeah. I think it'll happen relatively quickly, too, with AI assist. And it is incredibly compute -intensive. So it's a good case study, and why those, you know, middle -east investments are the biggest no -brainer ever. He just worked backward the implied amount of computation, but then the the benefit of solving virtually every disease is just so overwhelmingly valuable and watch so much capital that you're not wasting on on you know old age homes or on dealing with with you know Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and it allows humanity to be more productive.

2:03:36There was a study out of Oxford, London School of Business and Harvard that said, for every additional year of health that you give a population, it's worth $38 trillion to the global economy. This is one of the most, if you want to solve the U .S. economic issues and China's economic issues, make the population healthier and live longer. That wraps up AI and science. Let's talk about one last subject here today, which is as the father of two now 14 year old boys I think about a lot, which is reforming education. I'm going to play a short video clip, and then I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

2:04:14I applied to probably around 18 schools, and I was rejected from maybe around 15 of those. In fact, we have a map. So in all the places that reject you, not to make you feel worse looking at this list, well, let's just share your statistics because I know that factors into college emissions, right? Your GPA and SAT score? GPA was 4 .42 weighted. SAT score was 1590. Okay and in fact I think we have that on the graphic just so folks can see that. So the point of this story is are we going to move back to meritocracy? where in fact selection and admission into schools is based upon performance and not anything else.

2:05:03Benasticky Subject coming out of the last four plus years on DEI, Dave, you're deeply embedded in AI and technology at MIT. How do you think about this? Well, schools are between a rock and a hard place because they clearly had quotas and so. So, you know, and then now the rules say you're not supposed to do that, but, you know, they're just totally stuck between a rock and a hard place on this topic. But I don't think they do a great job of choosing who to let in toward any particular outcome that they're targeting anyway. There's a more to life than a 1590 SAT and a 4 .42 GPA. And I see a lot of the students that are underperforming in the classes that I teach just because they need to be creative and they need to build businesses and they need to recruit and need to motivate people and none of that gets measured well by these particular metrics.

2:06:02And I see too many people that are curated to be perfect applicants from age like six. And it doesn't go particularly well. So I don't know. I think the school should be allowed to choose with pretty broad brushes what they're trying to achieve with their student body. And so hopefully this doesn't go too far. I think we have to re -invent the whole university system in the first place. One of the questions of what we have of those who has had for Selim and I both have boys the same age within a month of each other is university going to be a thing by the time they get to college age and what will its purpose be.

2:06:39So Selim, how are you thinking about this? I'm in the same mode of the driverless cars. I'm desperately hoping the university system implodes in the next five years before why has to go. Purely because, you know, the taking a four -year degree to get credentialed in some domain that you're then supposed to be an active worker in for four years before your retire is completely out of date. The model of a university has not changed in 450 years. It's desperately broken. Deep research is fundamentally incredibly important. So I think that's really killer. I know that the most interesting stat for me is that more than half the CEOs in Silicon Valley have a liberal large degree.

2:07:19And I find that really interesting because the different models of how you think drives creativity and product design, disthane, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a vector there to be explored in terms of how to think about all this. And Mo, my, you know, my experience is that the majority of leaders and influential individuals out of the Middle East are all coming to the US for their degrees. What's the buzz there in the Emirates? No, I think the reality is that I meet more MIT and Stanford graduates here than I do in America most of the time. It is quite staggering, actually. That's fantastic.

2:08:00I mean, it is definitely, and I think it's definitely revived the top management of the region very, very interestingly. I wonder why I wonder though if if Selim's wish will come true. Because I don't know if the university systems would implode, but I definitely think our belief in universities would. And it really is quite an interesting thing because four years in a world that's moving at X speed is very different than a world that's moving at 10x speed. And that's what we're seeing now. So if everyone's going to entrepreneurship, and everyone can use loveable or cloud or whatever to write code or start businesses or agents are everywhere, you'll probably see entrepreneurship age go to 16 and 14.

2:08:50And you may see a very different world. And I want to. Dave, you want to talk about that? I mean, you've seen the shift in terms of the companies that are becoming unicorns I get a decade earlier. Yeah. Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, but I think the universities are about friendships and the friendships turn into company formations. And a lot of the universities don't recognize the degree to which that's the dominant factor that's keeping them alive. So if they want to survive this transition, they got to embrace that as what they're delivering. It's credentials and it's relationships between human beings that are the dominant, deliverable to the students.

2:09:29They need to be turned into entrepreneurial boot camps. Yeah. Well, here we see another article, UAE, to make chat GPT plus free to all of its citizens. You know, again, these are forward -looking moves to all of the AI's mandatory education now for six years or higher, I think. Crazy. And the statistic here is really important, right? What's the stat I heard was that a student with an AI is learning subjects between two to four times faster than going to school. And that's just going to overwhelm the existing system very quickly. I think this is an awesome move. Well, also the concept of a curriculum, which is, you know, we only have so many teachers, so we can only afford 12 subjects, 15 subjects.

2:10:16With AI assist, you can afford 20 ,000, a million different subjects. So not only are the students self -directing it their own pace, but they're also learning whatever they think is most relevant to their path Which is so much more effective than the old way and I personally Personalized education you know you're you're learning math Focused on your favorite sports star movie star your favorite you know scenarios and stories Close out with this Provocative article that came out that around 5 % of teal fellows have become billionaires from Vitalik to Austin Russell. And reminding people, the Teal Fellowship is paying you to drop out of college.

2:10:59So what is it saying that our most productive years were wasting in our university experience instead of starting companies, fascinating thought. Dave, I'll start with you. Well, first of all, the Teal Fellowship doesn't try to teach you anything, it just selects you. And so it shows you the degree to which the schools are not selecting, you know, they're getting nowhere near a 5 % unicorn rate coming out of the schools. But Teal, you know, given the abundance of big data that's out there, the Teal Fellowship can just be a better selection and application process that covers topics like, are you self -motivated?

2:11:37Are you high energy? Can you recruit? Do you think through these AI topics, you know, those are all baked into that selection process. So it's very viable for these credentials to replace the university degree as the credential that everybody wants. So it's something the school should really be aware of. But it's, you know, it's not super hard to put together a AI assisted analytic that tries to predict who's going to succeed as an entrepreneur. And that's all the Teal Fellowship tries to do. And that gives you a little bit of money and encourages you. But it's really what you're really giving you as the credential.

2:12:08So, Liam, do you want to? Yeah, I agree with Dave on this one. And I think this is not a negative comment on the university system. I think the teal fellowship selects for people that are such outliers that the university system doesn't kind of accommodate for them anyway. I think there's a systemic issue on the university side, which we've talked about already. I know that more than half of CEOs in Silicon Valley or have a liberal arts degree, because the different ways of thinking, how to think, are really important in product strategy and company strategy and so on. I do, you know, if you're doing, for example, a master's degree in neuroscience today, you're at a date by the time you finish your degree because computational neuroscience is totally taking over the field.

2:12:50So undergrads and masters are kind of essentially mostly relevant in terms of learning with AI. If you're a student, you're learning with AI, you're moving and learning between two to four times faster than being in school. And so all sorts of things will have this thing. And I mentioned that maybe hopefully my university system employs in the next five years before I have to pay for my kid to go to school and run his 18. I do think education and healthcare are the two massive industries and expenditures for people that are gonna be completely disintermediated, disrupted, democratized, and demonetized.

2:13:28I hope. All right, a lot of amazing stuff. Let's wrap around the horn here thoughts on today's conversations. Dave, can we start with you? Yeah, Mo, it's been fantastic getting your perspective. I think, uh, uh, come on.

2:13:47Well, look, we're building toward an intentional future from here forward. It's what we decide to do and what we decide to build. So, so I think today we got a really good deep understanding as some of the risks and things we need to start planning for. But I do feel like everything is solvable if we work on it. We're on an exponential time now, so we have very limited window of time to work on it. That was one of my great takeaways from today's pod, but much appreciated perspective. Mo, how do you wrap up your thoughts from today? Yeah, I think just like it is a singularity and there is an upside utopia and an downside dystopia, I think we should equally weigh our views of the optimistic possibilities and the dangers or risks that we have to address.

2:14:36I have to say I'm extremely, extremely excited about the scientific breakthroughs that we can see from AI in the next couple of years. And I think the most important topic, even though we didn't cover as much of it today, but we mentioned that there's alpha evolve and the whole idea of self -evolving AI's in my mind. This probably is the top topic to keep your eyes on in the next 12 months. Selim, close this up, buddy. I think we should have a whole episode just on alpha evolve. I think it's such an important topic technically, but also philosophically. I go back to the kind of standard basis for my optimism that technology has always been a major driver of progress in the world.

2:15:20It might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen as Rick Friswell mentions a lot. And now we have AI uplifting all of these other technologies enabling. So that's the reason for the huge optimism. Yeah, again, I've said this before. I think we're holding two potential futures for humanity in superposition. One is an extraordinary future of abundance, up -leveling of 8 billion humans on the planet, becoming a multi -plantary species that Star Trek universe. The other one is not quite as pleasant, we'll call it the dystopian future. And the day of the Max Universe. And day one of the things that you said, I want to just echo, is it's, we have the ability to create an intentional future.

2:16:05This future is not happening to us. We have the ability to guide where it goes. And I think all the entrepreneurs listening today, it's the most important thing that we can do. what is the vision that you want to create in the world? And you have the tools now, access to capital, access to compute, access to intelligence to go make that future happen. And I think it's not ours to abdicate to somebody else. I think we need to take action. So a lot happening. All of you respect you deeply, love you all. And so excited to be on this journey. I look forward to seeing you guys in a week or so. Thanks for having us.

2:16:45Yeah, thank you. I'm looking up with me. Hey there, this is Celine bouncing through SFO today. I hope you enjoyed that episode. It's clear from the pace of change that every organization needs to change. On June 19th, we're going to be having a two hour workshop for $100 on how to turn yourself into an EXO. Come join us as the best $100 you'll spend all year. We've had rave reviews of these. We do it about monthly. We restrict it to a few dozen people so it's a very intimate affair. and we'll be actually going through actual case studies and what you specifically can do. Don't miss it. Come along June 19th.

2:17:20The link is below. See you there.