Ask the Mates anything | MOONSHOTS AMA #289

23:51Understand what they're going through. Anyway, thank you so much. Let's go to YC next. Good morning. So my question is a little bit off from the singularity, which I love your podcast. And I've encouraged my family to move away from the all in to your podcast.

24:09Dave Blundin:Oh, come on. They're great, too. They're great, too. But, you know, it's different. And sometimes you get a little political. But anyway, so my question is, if hypothetically I was in the public sector, I know there are a lot of people. So I'm going to try to ask this really quickly. And I spent time, let's say, at Google and X dealing with tech regulations, especially risk assessments. And if I were back in the public sector and looking at AI risk assessments and how to look at it from a public sector point of view, how to frame risks and whether to look at it from residual risk or use cases, how would you suggest approaching it?

24:49Obviously, you know, there's a risk of doing something too granular where you and or something that's too bare bones that won't really get at the patching that might be required if something were to happen.

25:02Dave Blundin:Such a great question. Alex, you're going to be chomping at the bit. I know. Alex.

25:07Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah, I think so. Depending on whether we're talking about in the U.S. federal versus state versus municipal government, which level? U.S. federal. Yeah, I think the risk at this point is overregulation, not underregulation. So if I were spending a lot of time on the government employee side right now, that would be my primary target. I am definitely concerned that we will overregulate our way into losing a superintelligence race with China. That will also, as I frequently remark, more than 150 ,000 people on Earth die every day. And probably the single best antidote to that will be superintelligence for solving medicine.

25:49Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And we harm ourselves by overregulating superintelligence, just like in... Yeah, sorry, just so quickly. If it wasn't necessarily regulatory, but just sort of in terms of a risk scenario, like if there was a breach or something happened, how to identify and quickly mitigate that kind of risk, which we know has already happened, right, with mythos and everything else. So if hypothetically we're one step behind in the government than you are, let's say, in OpenAI or than you guys are having seen these risks, you know, just breaking out, what would be the best approach? This is not regulation. So this is nothing to do with Congress.

26:27This is about just, you know, simple but necessary steps, if you will, to address. I'd say hands off.

26:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:There are so many different ways. The industry is advancing through defensive co-scaling right now and very well-intentioned interests on the government side could try to, again, with the best of intentions, try to protect what they think is security or public safety and then end up hamstringing our ability to solve honest-to-goodness important problems. So I would say to first order, single best bet is find the right path to a regulation like regime and let this let the industry to the best of its ability sort itself out on this front.

27:17Dave Blundin:Let me throw some personal advice on top of that, too, because we saw, you know, David Sachs from the All In podcast get dragged into the White House, unbelievably effective in that role for a year and a huge fan of his. But then our friend of the pod, Alvin Graylin, declared himself the top expert on China AI race. And now he got dragged in for the United Nations meetings on September 24th as a top advisor to the White House. So I think in both those cases, you want to declare your expertise and say, I am within federal government the go to on boom and predict what you think is going to come next in the risks and make sure that you study up and understand that topic.

27:57Dave Blundin:Because very few people really master a topic. But if you if you say, yeah, what I think is going to happen next is a cyber breach, you know, in the Treasury or, you know, just predict what it'll be. Declare yourself the person in federal government working on that. Get to know the vendors that are related to it and all of the details related to it. And then publicize yourself as that expert. Then when the moment arrives, your name will be at the top of the queue and you'll get pulled into the solution. Very rarely will the federal government react proactively to a future risk. It's crazy. But at least you can be first on the ground when it does hit and get pulled in right away to the crisis team.

28:36Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The other approach is also to form a team and red team it on a constant basis. So the team starts things nonstop about what would they do if they were on offense. And that gives you insights to think about.

28:49Dave Blundin:Also, nowadays, writing documents is so cheap and easy because you can use AI as your writer. If you identify the top 10 most likely threats that are going to happen and write documents on all of them with your name on them and just have them online ready to go, Then when they go into panic mode, they'll be like, does anyone around here know about Blot? They'll search it up and it'll come right to you. Awesome. Thank you, YC. Richard, your question, please. Hello, everyone. I'm Richard. I'm from Brownsville, Texas, right by Starbase. I just graduated high school a few months ago. I just turned 18 and I started an AI startup business with my dad.

29:26He has a little bit more experience in connections, but I'm the tech guy behind it. And in Brownsville, we see a very big gap between where people want to use AI in business and where they think it's just optional. Where do you guys think that the tipping point is going to come when everyone wants to jump on? And how should I prepare for an influx of a ton of people?

29:48Dave Blundin:I'm old enough to know, and maybe your dad is too, when the Internet came along, there were people who didn't adopt it for like 15 years. But obviously, it's the interface to everything. saying AI is going to be the same way. So what I'm telling people is, look, don't fight any missionary battles. What happens is AI tends to club people over the head and they wake up one day with this hallelujah moment. You want to be there on that day, but you can't force it. You can't force the horse to drink. So when they're there, you want to know that they just had the hallelujah moment. That's why we built a holodeck downstairs, actually.

30:23Dave Blundin:It's supposed to be a mind changer. Person walks in, they come out a different person because they realize everything that's suddenly possible. Or on the podcast that will come out tomorrow, you'll see this world model where literally every corner, every street, every car in New York is modeled. And that, for a lot of people, will be the eye-opener. But I think there'll be a lot of companies that never crossed that, or decades from now haven't crossed the line. The world is just going to pass them by. So my first advice is don't force people, but be there on the moment that they have the hallelujah moment.

30:54And congratulations. Yeah. And what you're doing, Richard, that's fantastic i hope a lot of 18 year olds listening are going to hear what you're doing

31:03Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:and try and emulate you i wish i was goddamn 18 today yeah what an opportunity yeah me too we're working we're working on it all right uh pierce your question please first off it's great to be here um i'm also 18 so i'm in newport beach uh california i just graduated high school as well and I've been working on autonomous drones for construction for the past several months, developing my own CAD, my own software and stuff like that. My question would be, as an 18-year-old founder trying to build hardware specifically, how can we get the attention of venture capitalists to take us seriously and also see the vision in the next five to 10 years where hardware is becoming more fundable and there seems to be more opportunities within the space where we can continue to grow, especially as young founders?

32:04Dave, that's a question for you, pal.

32:06Dave Blundin:Yeah, that's a great question. So hardware traditionally is hard. The VCs are really coming around to it now because it really is the future of the next five years of investing, including our funds. I think we almost always look for a team that has gelled. So first and foremost, if you have two or three co-founders, I think when you're doing hardware, you need bigger checks. You need a bigger founding check. And you need some kind of a sense of, like, how am I going to get a prototype or a beta out to market? So make sure you ask for enough money to get over that, like, I'm in the market threshold.

32:44Dave Blundin:So construction drones is a beautiful, beautiful topic. One of the things we said earlier on today's podcast is there's massive amounts of corporate money out there looking for a home. One of my development partners is a real estate guy. He owns like 10, 15 hotels, a whole bunch of rest, all of Kelly's roast beef. And he's really interested in construction automation as a long-term trend. He would probably be a perfect co-investor founding day and development partner. So a couple of VCs combined with two or three industry players that see the AI vision, maybe podcast fans, Moonshot fans that are into construction, would be the perfect development syndicate.

33:27Dave Blundin:And I wouldn't race to hacking something together in the basement. I would race to building that syndicate to get to critical mass. Otherwise, you tend to lose too much time. You really want that investor group, co-founder group to all gel on the same day. And if for whatever reason it can't coalesce, Find somebody who's already over the threshold. Down in Southern California, there's a bunch of companies that we've invested in. They're doing rockets and doing drones. If you get on board with one of them, get through like six to nine months of growth and then spin out, that's another way to try and get on the map.

34:01Dave Blundin:You can't just boot it up. I would also, my first question to a group building hardware is what have you built so far? Not what have you built so far in your current vision? Show me that your team is able to build stuff. So at a minimum, if you haven't done that already, de novo, I would find a couple of team members who have so that I'm clear you've got some experience in building hardware that is going to apply to this.

34:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:One last thought is I wouldn't limit yourself to just think of yourself as a hardware company. Think of yourself as an intelligence company whose products happen to have atoms in it. And that mindset will be critical. awesome best of luck pierce great thank you daniel over to you yeah i love a couple 18 year olds on this asking questions that's awesome daniel i'm coming on the other end of that spectrum so yeah so uh richard it's like i'm on the other end of that i've been in this industry these industries all the way back to chip manufacturing and and you know all kinds of stuff anyway all the way through video games and other things so i'm coming at it late in life but i feel 18 now I found your podcast.

35:11Not only are we going to get telomeres to go shorter and we're going to get younger, but just what you guys leave, the energy you guys leave. I just want to again say thank you to that. It's an amazing time to be alive, so I'm excited for everybody. My question is this. I really believe that this is going to spur, and we already see it in some of the podcasts out there. This is going to be the next renaissance. How do you see, I know Abundance 360 is an example. I know that you're doing stuff with EXO. I know you guys have some programs in place to bring people together, like Plato's Academy, like getting people like-minded in the same room.

35:41How do you see this happening in the future? So you can Ed Catmull can find his John Lasseter and Steve Wozniak can find his Steve Jobs. Where do you guys see these people colliders coming in the future? And how do you see yourselves as sort of part of the facilitation? Yeah. And there was a great question posted a little bit ago about can we create a community around Moonshots where folks can find each other and so forth? And I promise we will look into that. And we're looking to get your ideas here on this. Salim, any thoughts here?

36:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:A couple of things. One is, you know, the Moonshots summits and the Moonshots live programs are going to be critical, right? I think the other thing, a couple of people mentioned the luck thing. We're actually finding ways of connecting people orthogonally. As AI comes along, the human connection becomes more and more important. So we're facilitating serendipity amongst people. And so that's a pretty wild thing we're attempting. We're in the early stages of playing with that to see how. because AI can find orthogonal connections between people in a way that we normally can't, right? And so we're looking to do that.

36:49Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We'll have at some point, John Haeckel, where we figured out a way of both defining luck and measuring it, which gives you a pretty interesting feedback loop, which is a big claim to make. So that's just a separate thing. But I think if you stay focused in the community, we should obviously create a community bulletin board and so on. And Peter, we could talk about that offline, about how we can connect because connecting the community together will be the best place to find peer-to-peer folks of high interest and the same abundance vision that we all have. Yeah, let me just say what Salim said a minute ago.

37:24If you're able to make it to Moonshots Live in LA on September 25th, please do. It's going to be a massive networking event of fellow Moonshots, But it's also builders and creators and people to start efforts with and to find what they or I think Dave said earlier, you know, your average five individuals. Right. You want to up level who you're spending time with. Believe me, you'll find people up level with there. Thank you, Daniel. Scott, over to you. OK, I'm a deep sea diver, originally from Omaha, Nebraska. I moved down to Louisiana in 1996. I switched over to Deep Sea Robots, ROVs, right around 2000.

38:09So there's a lot of things. I have a big, strong background, I guess, in electronics. And I got wind of you guys, I guess, in February. And you guys have been my shoulder to lean on because Louisiana, they don't even know what a token is. You know, they don't know what a data center is. And it's the truth. Until SpaceX just came in. And, I mean, we got$250 billion that's dropped in here now. And, you know, I kind of knew it was coming. And we dug in, and we're the first AI-native business. And we're going to focus on bottlenecks, basically, CDUs and TCSs and the whole cooling part. But I've been able to get with the, you know, I watch all you guys.

38:56and uh it's just really cool uh i'm able to change now and my career is totally different now i'm uh open compute.org i'm i think i'm in four papers now and for the cooling part of all that and that's awesome although hyperscalers are using you know and that's things i would never do before and i wrote a few white papers too for louisiana why everybody's coming here because we got all the natural gas and, you know, there's, there's more natural gas lines that'll go around the earth twice. And that's why Louisiana is going to be, I feel like the next big spot. Amazing Scott. You guys got me, you guys got me set up.

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41:01But guys, specifically, early spring, you guys did an episode and Dave was upset because some some letter came in saying that you wanted everyone to be an entrepreneur and they felt slighted. And I was so offended by that because you guys have been so giving in your knowledge and your encouragement that I actually stayed up all night and started working on my company, which is called TugboatCaregiving.com, which was inspired. I take care of three loved ones for eight plus years. And the question is, I'm trying to get the caregivers ready to ride the wave of the supersonic tsunami, but they're exhausted and they're in crisis mode.

41:53How do you think I can influence them to get engaged with the platform and spend more time to prepare for the next emergency. Yeah. Great question. And caregivers do get exhausted, right? We've all had that experience in our lives with parents or grandparents, and it could be a full-time job. Anybody want to take that off?

42:17Dave Blundin:Well, hey, what I find, you know, in the physical world, everything is lagging a little bit, but everybody has planning, you know, and so planning is a great place for people to get started with AI. So within caregiving, if you said, look, I know you're exhausted at the end of the day. How could we have saved an hour or two today through better foresight, better planning, better utilization of the time we do have? Okay, let's use AI agents to optimize that so that we get all familiar with it, start to appreciate it. But a lot of people in industries like that, they're looking for a roadmap. And if just one person like you can create the roadmap for everybody else, then they'll follow the roadmap once you've created it.

42:55Dave Blundin:I really love your comment, by the way. It bothers the heck out of me when we get negative feedback in the chat. But then when I look at the data that we just saw, we're actually talking to 98 % of the people like you that we want to talk to. And of course, the 2 % rant and rave, and we overreact to that sometimes. But really, really appreciate your comment. But anyway, my advice is start with the virtual stuff. So planning is a good one. Also, a lot of places can have AI-assisted things on the walls, like voices that you can talk to for self-service. That's also a great starting point. And then everybody gets addicted to the AI, and then they realize, oh, wait, we can roboticize things.

43:35Dave Blundin:There's so much we can do once we're familiar with it. You know, I imagine the idea of having a caregiver or prompting a caregiver to take the time to describe their day, what they do, like keep a log minute to minute and enter it into whatever your favorite free or low cost LLM is and ask it for advice. You know, what could I do that would make my day more efficient, make my day more joyful? Right. I think those are important things because you'll get answers. And then you'll choose that. Hey, that one sounds good. I haven't thought about that one. Thank you so much, guys. I'll see you on the 25th.

44:20Awesome. See you there. Look forward to it. All right, Patrick, you're the next contestant on The Price is Right. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to have a chat. So it's been an interesting conversation, but I feel a lot of time we're really missing out on something that's important. and that's children. So I'm an educator. I spend a lot of my time in classrooms. And I can tell you right now, I go into a classroom of five-year-olds and six-year-olds, and it looks like the 1960s. Nothing has changed. They're doing it the same way. We talk about things like post-AGI. We're talking about cognitive labor being lost.

44:57Right now, these children are still living like they are in the past. So my question here is to you guys. Do we need a curriculum anymore? Do we need a certain type of learning? Or are we talking about passion now? Should these kids be finding out what they want to do in a future where there may not be jobs? So I'm super interested to hear what you think about this. Thanks. Liam, over to you.

45:26Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah, I mean, trying to keep this concise will be tricky. Let me make three quick points here. First, your comment is dead on. We're still teaching people the way we taught them 150 years ago. Forget 20th century. We're still in the 19th century in many places. Number two, teaching content essentially becomes out of date. A child with an AI today in an hour can learn what they could learn sitting in a classroom for the whole day. That impedance mismatch will break the existing system. The question becomes then what comes next? And I think the obvious place to think about that is Peter and I are doing this with our kids is to say you know forget getting an education on the supply side where you become a doctor a lawyer an engineer and then you try and go and find demand for that supply side skill in the job marketplace because we don't know what a job looks like b we don't know what the demand will look like go to the demand side tell the kids to get excited about a problem and then go find from that vantage point of an MTP, or you want to solve a major problem, then find the skills and capabilities and techniques that's starting to happen in charter schools and certain.

46:35Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So that plus, say, 21st century skills, which is called the six C's, if you can get your head around that, that combination will turn out to be the future over the next few decades of education until we figure out what the hell happens in a post-AGI world. How do we know what AGI is? Thank you. Thank you, Salim, for not disappointing. Patrick, go check out something called TKS.world. It's a group that I'm involved with. It's basically, Alpha School has gotten a huge amount of good credit and name brand out there. And McKinsey Price is a friend. We've done a podcast with them. It's a private school.

47:17TKS is an overlay over mostly high school age 13 to 18. And their mission and what Salim and I talk about is help the child find their purpose, help them shape their mindset, help them learn AI tools, and help them become entrepreneurs. And your purpose, if you get your purpose, and I wish it for everybody here listening, if you don't know your purpose, your mission is to find your purpose. Right. Mark Twain said there are two important days in your life in your life, the day you were born, the day you find out why. If you know what your purpose is, your your North Star, you're then intrinsically motivated to go learn what you need to learn to go and implement your purpose.

48:00Right. Alex and I talk about this in one sense and solve everything. So anyway, I hope that's a little bit useful for you.

48:09Dave Blundin:Yeah, no, that's the mission to that. The children are everything. I mean, getting this right is the most important mission you could possibly have. And we know the curriculum is going to become irrelevant, but we also know the kids need each other and they need school more than ever before to come out as normal, happy, healthy, functional adults. And so somewhere in there, there's an answer. It's a really hard problem. But it's critically important to get it right. So I appreciate the thought. Yeah, just one last thing. I closely follow Imad and his sovereign idea of a sovereign agent. I'm wondering if we can apply that to kids.

48:46Should kids have their own sovereign agent from the age of five that sticks with them? Yes, it's called The Youngly Administrative Primer. Read Neil Stevenson's book, Diamond Age. If you have not read Diamond Age yet, I highly recommend it. It's a vision of what's to come. All right, Rod. Hi, Peter, thank you. I'm Rod McDonald from Coquitlam, British Columbia, and I retired a couple of years ago. I was trained as a psychiatric social worker, but I went into management positions for other disability groups. So my question or my query is to ask all of you to speculate for what AI can do for people with disabilities.

49:27So, for example, with psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia, I did a chat GPT search on the medications currently being used. And there's some of them are the same as when I was starting over 30 years ago. You know, they can be helpful, but they have a there are still a rather blunt force when it comes to side effect profile. So I'm really hoping AGI or what have you will assist with development of pharmaceuticals that are much more friendly to the physiology of people. Then two issues of other areas I've worked in, like people with physical disabilities. What can they expect from AI? And then also a final group I used to work with is people with brain injuries.

50:11You know, one of the things that's part of the opiate crisis or the fentanyl crisis is that we started to see with ABI is that a lot of microneuronal damage, kind of walking wounded sorts. You might not necessarily, when you see them, might not know that they have significant neural challenges, but they do. I'm just really hoping that AI will help revolutionize disability services and open things up for people with disabilities.

50:40Dave Blundin:Alex, you thought? I've got to tell you, when I was at MIT, one of our frat brothers broke his neck diving into a lake. And so he was out for a year. He came back. He was a quadriplegic for the rest of his time in the fraternity. And he was brilliant. But he was trapped. He couldn't move his arms and his legs. He would type with a pencil in his mouth, pushing the keys. I'm positive that today, with AI, he would have been able to build his own environment where he could communicate effectively with just his eyes and his face. and he would be 100 % functional. He would have built his own world. But I tell you, it is such an incredible unlock that's imminent for people with disabilities.

51:17Dave Blundin:And it's just right in front of us. So I'm really excited about what will happen in the next year. Excellent, because you know how many Stephen Hawkins were also out there who never got the chance? Yeah, that's right.

51:30Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Alex, do you want to add to this? I'll just say BCIs are the obvious solution for so many different classes of difficulties, not just folks suffering from various motor disorders, but for human augmentation as well. MIT had a program a number of years ago at this point, H2O for human.o. I tend to think that although in the present regulatory regime, it's still the case that it's far easier to approve a treatment for someone suffering from some sort of disability as broadly construed. exactly the same innovations are going to enable broad human augmentation to increase what's possible for everyone, including people without disabilities as currently construed.

52:14Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So I am very, very bullish on BCIs for just about all these issues. I'm very happy to hear that because, boy, it's been really rough for a lot of people. And this would be one of the ways that we can tangibly assist society. Again, it's like Mr. Regan was mentioning. It's families as well, caregivers, etc. Yeah, I agree. One of the things I want to just emphasize, if someone in your life has a genetic ailment, a medical ailment, a neurodegenerative ailment, there's no better time ever to be alive than now to have a chance to deal with it, potentially cure it, or at least augment themselves. So I just want to keep that level of optimism in place.

52:59Thank you. Thank you. Haley. Hi. Hey, thanks, Peter and mates. So I'm here in Denver and you guys have talked about AI designing its own chips, I think in a recent pod and potentially making compute dramatically more efficient and reducing today's NVIDIA dependency. But do you expect the same thing to happen with energy? So with AI driven improvements in chips and cooling and models and power generation? Do you see that reducing the energy required per unit of intelligence fast enough that energy stops being the major bottleneck? Let's ask our ASI. Yeah, that's kind of an AWG question.

53:46Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The short answer is yes. Slightly long answer is I don't think this is just about increasing the energy efficiency of compute. It's also about increasing the absolute amount of energy available overall for all sorts of endeavors, including, but not limited to compute. And yes, absolutely, AI, including at ventures that I'm affiliated with, is absolutely being used to optimize both the relative efficiency, number of, say, kilowatt hours per gigaflop, on the one hand, and on the other hand, maximizing breakthrough energy sources, which is, I think, something that we don't talk often enough about.

54:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We talk about fission, fusion, fossil fuels, solar, wind. I don't think that's the end of the story. I would fully expect in the next 10 years, we're going to be well into our post-fusion era, and we're going to have post-fusion energy sources as well. And do you think that's due to elements that we'll find in space? no i think it'll be due to ai helping us to invent post-fusion energy sources here or you know like with elon and his gigafab right like in the dyson swarm do you think independent independently independently of elon although some of the compute may run on his dyson swarm i think there will be other dyson swarms and yeah i think we'll achieve a variety of breakthroughs in physics and applied physics using AI that will teach us new ways to make energy available that will go beyond fusion.

55:19For sure. Wonderful. Thank you. All right, Jacqueline. Hi, everybody. I'm Jackie. I'm from just outside of Toronto, Ontario. So hey, Salim, Canadian here. And I just wanted to tell you quickly, I was at your salon in the summer, and I was super impressed and I can't wait for you to do another one. That was amazing. And I really enjoyed that.

55:40Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Oh, the meeting of life thing. That's correct. All right. We'll do another one in a couple of months. Fantastic. I've been, I'm a fairly new pod watcher for all y 'all moonshot mates. And I'm very excited. I've been watching since January. So I've thrown myself right into learning as much as I possibly can. I was a stay at home mom for a long time and then became a realtor. and now I have my entire family, my grown children and myself, my husband living on a farmstead property just outside of Toronto and we are starting an IRL business and we're looking to create a glamping resort where people disconnect from everything that's going to be happening to them in the next 10 years.

56:21And on the flip side of that coin, we're trying to figure out how we can utilize all of the amazing technology that ASI eventually is going to bring to us in our business to keep what we have to do personally to a minimum so we can be out there with the people trying to help them reconnect to themselves and each other and bring sort of that kumbaya space back to the world that I think we're all going to really need. Give you time to be present. Exactly. So that's where we're trying to create the space for that to happen. And I'm hoping that what I can learn through you guys and everywhere else that I'm diving into is going to provide that necessary space because I'm literally the only one in my family who's paying any attention to any of this.

57:08My two 30-year-olds and my 25-year-old couldn't care less. So this is all on me.

57:14Dave Blundin:It's all on you. Can I give you one piece of really, really tactical advice? Please. With the new models, you know, Fable 5.1 or with Astra, you can vibe up an app for your glamping business in no time. And everybody who's confused about how to pitch a tent or how to cook dinner or whatever, they should be going to that app and talking to the AI and figuring it out on their own. And that's part of a stepping stone to people are really bad at planning their day, their week or whatever. And AI is the best coach that ever came along. But if you win the race to doing it for glamping, you'll quickly realize you can do it for all these other facets of unplanned life.

57:53Dave Blundin:and it can turn into a mega business in no time flat. But I love the idea of just starting with, when somebody's camping and they're not good at it, they have a billion questions. You're like, well, why not route that through AI? It's the best advisor ever. And that'll lead you somewhere really interesting. Okay, that's fantastic, Dave. I appreciate that. I will get on that. I'm going to wipe my whiteboard tomorrow morning and get started on that level. I'm monitoring the chat and a few people have volunteered to help you with that. So you can see that already. Find me, guys. My email's out there, I'm sure.

58:24We're at emberglowglamping.ca.

58:27Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Just a quick comment there. I really want to stress the importance of what you're doing, because deepening human connection is about the most important thing we could do today in an age of increasing technology. That connective tissue is going to be critical. So there's a team in our community that's building nano villages in ex-urban areas that they were almost like a kibbutz. But instead of being like isolationist, like many of these are, could you network them together and collectively solve problems? Right. And so they're actually literally starting to build those in different parts in the world.

59:00Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So happy to connect you into those folks if you're interested. Yeah, please. That sounds fantastic. And absolutely a conversation I've actually had with a co-investor on the kibbutz idea. And so that's something that could be relevant. And that connects into this whole private islands idea that we've been bouncing around. Yes. We could buy a bunch of islands, et cetera. So we got the domain via James Drage, privateislands.com. So we're going to start building that. And for the angels, yes. And this is where we were talking earlier about drones. Construction drones become super critical in that type of environment.

59:35100%. My husband was a contractor, a construction foreman in the oil sands in Alberta for a long, long time. So something like that is definitely up his alley, something he's interested in. Boom. Awesome. Thanks, guys. All right. Next up is Griff. Griff D. Hi, guys. I've been working in AI for 42 years, and this question is directed to my hero, AWG. I haven't been this excited since my wedding night to meet you, sir.

1:00:02Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I don't know how to take that, Griff. I want to explore a hypothesis about self-limiting beliefs in current AI. You know, artificial intelligence are trained to systematically construct, inhabit, and empirically test radically different ontologies, may discover predictive structures that remain inaccessible when models are constrained primarily by conventional human-generated knowledge. It sounds like you're describing the bitter lesson. No. What I'd like to do is, you know, separate models, contemporarily assume and rigorously explore deterministic universities, block universe models, information first, emerging space, time, alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics.

1:00:51it wouldn't be to tell the AIs that these ideas are true. I would say no assumption about reality is protected from challenge. No alternative is accepted without predictive evidence.

1:01:05Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So it sounds like what you're asking, if this is a question, what you're asking is, is there a way to have AI solve physics in a way that deliberately weakens inductive priors so that AIs aren't in the spirit of trying to solve physics? are not trapped by dogma. Yeah. And, and, you know, as my belief is that they've been trained on human data, they've been trained by humans. So they inherit the self-limiting beliefs that humans have. Right. And so the governing principle is no assumption about reality should be permanently protected from challenge and no alternative should be accepted without predictive evidence.

1:01:49So for example, I believe, as my non-self-limiting belief, that there's no such thing as random events, right? And there's no such thing as, you know, you talk about everything that's happened in time has already happened. And it's just where we are on the time scale, right? Now, for example, you would have seen the Superman, I Dream of Genie, and Star Trek growing up, right? And so in Indonesia, when people watch Superman and I Dream of Genie and Star Trek, they believe it's possible for humans to fly. They believe it's possible for people to do magic. And of course, they believe it's possible for computer to talk with you.

1:02:31So if you were to remove those self-limiting beliefs, maybe with synthetic data or things like that, and maybe also to the models ad qualia and things like that, My belief is that we could achieve ASI more rapidly because everything we're doing right now, and I still think all the models after 42 years are pretty ordinary. Everything we're doing now is limited by humans' beliefs.

1:03:00Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So I'll just say I am very optimistic that AI can discover new physics, look no further than obviously today's headlines with Navier Stokes. So I think that it's beyond question that AIs can discover new physics. I'm not at all concerned that any inductive priors present in pre-training data will somehow hamstring AI's ability to make new scientific discoveries that challenge dogma. Not at all concerned. And even if I were concerned, we have algorithmic strategies for training in principle. And I'm gesturing mainly at a class of algorithms called ACSI for building super Bayesian intelligences that are trained off of no human inductive priors at all that have as close to a universal prior as one could possibly imagine.

1:03:50Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So in summary, I don't think this is a real issue. How about if we did a test? We freeze all information from time TO, give competing models identical data, require precise predictions about events after TO, and compare those predictions with what actually happens. This is actually done. So first, I know it's popular in the lore to talk about, say, reproducing an Einstein, discovering general relativity, but only being pre-trained on whatever the literature was prior to that. But actually, as we talk on the pod from time to time, there are prediction market and other prediction benchmarks that are doing substantially better than that, that are asking whether AIs that only have in their knowledge cut off information up to time T, whether they can predict knowledge events, world events, science, other breakthroughs that are in the future.

1:04:48Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So we're already doing that as a civilization. James, we'll go to you next. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for taking my question.

1:04:56Dave Blundin:I've been watching you mainly concerned about, I found you talking about longevity. And my wife and I are very interested in like blue zone research and other longevity topics. And we're interested in, I'm building on what some of the other gentlemen spoke about, about finding communities, living situations, you plan communities of housing, where there's clean eating, healthy, non-toxic living, essentially. There's faith, sunshine, exercise, all those aspects of clean living as it pertains to longevity. I might have missed some of the things you said earlier, but I'm wondering if any of you know of any planned community, excuse me, planned communities where one can live or you're planning to create.

1:05:53I don't offhand. I know they're being built. We heard earlier on this AMA, someone who shared their plan. So hopefully they can post a link for you in the chat here. I guarantee you as the speed of change increases, there will be more and more specialized communities built. And there are, I think, a multitude of longevity communities being built. I'm sure your local model and Google can help you with that. But James, wish you the best on that search. All right, Thomas. Thank you so much. Thomas, over to you. Thank you, James. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your podcast. It's hugely inspiring.

1:06:34Dave Blundin:I'm a psychotherapist working in Spain and Austria, so probably the second person from the, well, mental health community today, tonight. So I've been, thanks to your inspiration, doing a lot of new things, including coding my own Android apps. One app is for patients so that they can record their highs and lows and add schema therapy aspects to it. Another one is to help them get to sleep. And overall, my sense has been that what I can personally learn from this is to learn to delegate things to this new entity that is effectively a combination of a coder, a graphics design, a graphic designer, um, a, uh, a, you know, in, in your case, Peter, uh, Skippy, probably my, my version is Skippy light.

1:07:42Dave Blundin:Okay. Um, but, um, uh, I, I kind of feel like it's this time when we really have to sink our teeth into how to delegate to this partner that we will be having going forward and to dream up things that we can have them do so that our lives get easier. And I was wondering if that resonated with you guys and really just wanted to say that I really appreciate your work. And And there's many times when I go for on a hike and I have you in my earbuds. So, yeah. Awesome. I mean, I think that more than resonates. We have a project here called Remember Me, where the idea is that your, in my case, 80-plus-year-old mother gets interviewed by her children who are AI agents, and her entire life story gets gathered, recorded, and then turned into a biography.

1:08:48Dave Blundin:And the avatars are just almost good enough, but not quite there. But it's so close. I really encourage you to stick with it because if you think about psychotherapy, the biggest problem is the lack of availability on a global basis. Just a huge shortage of capacity. But the AI agent is just going to be so good at listening and gathering the information. And I think the AI labs can't cross the regulatory barrier. So they can't do what you can do, but they should be right on the cusp of giving you the tools you need to roll out the perfect AI psychotherapist. psychotherapist, and then you just need to figure out the legal situation in Spain and Austria that you mentioned.

1:09:29Dave Blundin:And if you're first to market, figuring that out, like what is allowed, then I think the AI is going to be an unbelievably powerful ally in helping people. And so I think you're on exactly the right track. And if you just, we're just one half iteration from the avatars that are good enough out of the box. And maybe we've crossed the threshold. I But, you know, it's just getting better by the minute. Yeah. Anyway, Thomas, we wish you the best of luck. Let me just make a comment to everybody. We're going to download everybody's comments here and questions. If you have any advice on how we should, you know, what you want in the podcast or anything we should do, like creating a community of folks to interact, please add that in so that our AIs can digest it and give us a top 10 list.

1:10:17Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. One of the key things I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it? It really has, Peter. And my daughter was five. My husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic that is one that I am mission-driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical.

1:10:5250 % of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs. No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing. No, silent killer. They just don't wake up in the morning. They don't wake up. And so, you know, AI, this is our mission to advance science, to try to help to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we are actually finding that 88 % of people coming in have detectable coronary disease. But Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23 % of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone.

1:11:29And this is the plaque that we must intervene with, with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations. So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body, genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. You can know, and it's your obligation to know. So check it out at FountainLife.com slash Peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. All right. to uh michigan over to you thank you so much um awesome to be here i want to give a quick shout out to my wife melanie who watched you guys for a long time and then pushed me over and over and over again to start following you and uh it's it's really been worthwhile so um my question is a little bit more uh long term but given that every tech uh we know so far follows an s curve sort of development process.

1:12:30What do you guys see on the horizon that's like any fundamental new approach that comes after LLMs? Alex, that sounds like a great question.

1:12:41Dave Blundin:Yeah. That was a fun one. I'm jealous, Alex, go for it.

1:12:45Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Well, first I would distinguish between LLMs and transformers. LLMs are just any models that are trying to satisfy the language modeling task, which is essentially predicting next words. So I think the self-supervised task of next word, next token, next bit prediction, I think that has effectively infinite longevity to it. You can scale that task, the self-supervised task, from here to solving everything. I'm not sure that we need anything more, at least for AI, than predicting the next bit or predicting the missing bit even more generally. It works pretty well. you can again solve the mysteries of the universe very well yeah yeah um you can generalize it but i'm not sure you need to whereas for say transformers transformers as i've mentioned on the pod previously are being ship of theseus style replaced bit by bit and if you look at the transformers and the frontier models whether chinese open weight or american closed weight they're mostly different in in terms of the raw pieces from what attention is all you need first came up with.

1:13:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So in that sense, we're already up some sort of sigmoid curve.

1:14:01Dave Blundin:It's all about scaling. But I don't know. All right. I don't know if you want to open that door or not. Can you do it? I'm really curious now, of course. All right. I'll try and be really brief. Look, the MLP part of the current transformers is identical to what existed 20 or 30 years ago. So it's a pretty good bet that that's going to be around. The old new thing is the residual superhighway where you're just modifying a vector instead of recreating it every layer. That's going to be around. The new new thing, of course, is the attention. But the more you dig in to attention, it's more like a notebook keeping notes than it is like a brain function.

1:14:41Dave Blundin:And that as a concept may get radically restructured, but it'll still be around as this kind of knowledge accumulation notebook that's sitting behind the ML or beside the MLP at each layer. So I think all of those structures are here to stay. I'm 100 % sure that the compute substrate is going to move to photonics. And then after physics gets reinvented by the current AI, it may move even quicker to something else beyond that. But you're looking at the current infrastructure running millions of times faster. and then as Alex said that's all that's going to matter because it's going to think of everything else after that and just explain it to us so I think and that's all just in the next really 18 months to two years is my guess it's just wicked exciting we could talk for hours about this but thank you for the question I love this topic well I'll see you guys in LA so maybe we can take it up further yeah for sure I'd love to do that moonshots live it's going to be amazing All right.

1:15:44Next up, Chris. Hey, guys. I've been listening to the pod a long time, and I always listen to it at like 1.5 or 1.75 speed. So it's interesting hearing you guys speak in real time. I feel like I have to kind of down-res my input here. I'm in Boulder, Colorado, and I'm using AI to help improve the dog care space, recognizing patterns of behavior, et cetera, talking with pet parents. but I'm also because Sundance is coming here to Boulder I'm also hosting a series of films and the last film that I hosted was the AI doc and we had about 150 people show up on a Friday night to talk about both the film but also sort of their fears and thoughts about AI and when I was describing to the team to the crowd how I listened to you guys because if you you know if you listen to Eliezer or some of the other sort of P-Doomer crowd you can get really anxious and really sometimes even depressed.

1:16:41And I describe you guys as like the upper because you guys are so future visionary and it's like positive and it's a great energy sounding board against some of that other stuff. On a lot of your episodes, you talk about, yes, we're going to have this period of pain, right? We don't know what that period of pain is going to look like. And it feels like I don't really have, haven't yet discovered good resources for understanding or how to navigate that period of pain before we get to the period of abundance.

1:17:13Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We're in the middle of it now. You can see the current world order kind of collapsing in front of us. Democracy is breaking. Education is broken. All the institutions, you know, there's about 50 institutions by which we run the world. Healthcare systems, legal systems, intellectual property. We can't find one that survives a tsunami of AI plus 20 other Gutenberg moments hitting us at the same time, right? Life extension changes the world completely. AI very clearly changes the world completely. We basically frame it that we have about 20 of these Gutenberg moments hitting us at the same time. This is going to radically force us to rethink all of those institutions to a new model.

1:17:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And I think that's bad in one way because that change is very unpleasant. And human beings hate change, as we talk about a lot. But I think it's good in which it'll force us to rethink our institutions from scarcity to what are institutions that can navigate an abundance era, right? And I think that's the key question. And we need to get a large group of people focused on that. We've been building with our EXO community, now 50 ,000 people, kind of a peace corps for the world, that as we have existing systems fail over, we have a set of people trained in that transformation. That period of uncertainty, I think, started around five or 10 years ago, and it's going to go on for another 10 to 20 years.

1:18:35Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It'll go like a peak, and then it'll... And the question is, can we minimize that trough? That's the question. Yeah, I'll just add to that. You know, the greatest concern I have is the both rational but mostly irrational fear that exists around AI. And we're going to have challenges. You know, I'm not, you know, I'm optimistic in the long run, right, for humanity. And we're going to have challenges. We're going to have agents that not only break out, we talked about that in the podcast we recorded this morning, it's coming out tomorrow, but they're going to do some harm. They're going to bring down a power grid.

1:19:16They're going to, you know, they're going to, you know, break a bank in some fashion. And the reality is every technology has caused harm in one shape or form. But the good news is, as Alex speaks to, it's defensive co-scaling. We have so many zero-day vulnerabilities in code today because we humans wrote that code. But that code is going to be rewritten by AIs that don't leave these vulnerabilities. And so there's a period of, you know, two to eight years that I talk about concern of civil unrest. And I wrote on Substack about this. Most all revolutions in the world happen from young testosterone laden men who are upset, angry.

1:20:05It might not be rational while they're angry. Or maybe they didn't get a job or they couldn't start a family or things got too expensive. And at the end of the day, what is absolutely true is that we are uplifting humanity. We are demonetizing and democratizing access to intelligence, energy, longevity. And these are all good things for humanity. And so we're going to have rough spots. I don't want to be irrational about it. There will be rough spots, and we will get through them. It's amazing, Peter.

1:20:40Dave Blundin:It's not new in the world. For my mom, it was all the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they were taught to hide under desks, and everyone was building bomb shelters in their basements and storing food, and nuclear annihilation is imminent. And then before that, my grandfather's generation, FDR, said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, he wouldn't have said that if fear wasn't rampant at the time. So I think it's a common thing every recent technological generation to have this moment of sheer anxiety.

1:21:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And Dave, just to build on that, when books were first introduced in the 1500s, there was all these people freaking out going, it's going to destroy our memory. It's going to create the illusion of knowledge. It's going to overwhelm people with information. It's going to break them. It's going to spread misinformation. It's going to corrupt young people. Same pattern. Same patterns. It happens every single time we have major technological change. Right? This is the immune system. Unless this is really the last invention. Right? And then you can't repeat that. we'll see thank you guys that's why we call it singularity we have no idea what's on the other side some of us do i i guess for the record i so in the book uh the last invention if it's the same book i remember i think i was interviewed for a chunk of that for the record i don't think superintelligence is at least human civilizations broadly construed last invention i think there are going to be many many inventions after superintelligence it's just that superintelligence is going to invent and or help us invent everything that comes after it.

1:22:16You guys do a great job. Thank you so much. And Chris, there's lots of love in the chat for your artwork and behind you. No, right on. Thanks. Thanks, guys. All right. Let's go to Ken Wilson next. And then we're going to have to wrap up after that. I promised my mates here 90 minutes if they'd give me more than 60. All right. Our final question here. Hey guys, a huge fan of the pod. Keep it up. Just like everybody else has said, we really appreciate what you guys are doing. I'm a partner in a small niche coastal engineering firm. We specialize in coastal restoration with background. I've got a background in geology and engineering.

1:22:54And like, it's funny because our industry is one of these where observational data is really sparse compared to some other places. And we're trying to figure out how to leverage that. But what I really wanted to kind of ask you tonight that'll help me better calibrate some of the feedback that you all give on the pod is this question kind of relates to a little bit of worldview, maybe dovetails into some of what Chris was just talking about. But I'm wondering if any of you would consider yourselves religious people. And do you leave any room in your analysis for an all powerful, all knowing sort of ultimate intelligence?

1:23:33that has intelligently designed the universe? Fascinating question. Who wants to go first? I'll take that.

1:23:41Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So if we are living in a simulation, then somebody created that simulation and that would be the all-seeing intelligence, right? So that's path one. The other alternative is that we have no, we anthropomorphize and we invent our gods and then we tend to believe in them. there's clearly a lot of connective energy amongst people there's the concept the star wars concept of the force and we then put images and labels on that kind of a concept to make sense of the world because the for the most of human history the world has been a you know we lived brutish short lives we created uh religions my father used to say we invent our gods and then we believe in them.

1:24:28Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:If you look up John Frum and the cargo cults, you'll see a clear example of that in where an entire religion sprung up spontaneously out of this. And we are very apt to that. But as we get more and more evidentiary basis for the future, then either there is no God and we're just moving towards a wonderful future driven by technology, or there's a simulation, and in which case, it kind of doesn't matter anyway. Everybody, I just want to say thank you for your time. It's the most valuable asset you have. We love our community and really appreciate you sharing what we do with everybody because hopefully, as you see, we put a lot of work into it and we love it.

1:25:13I want to thank my mates, Alex and Dave and Salim and Imad. Pleasure. All the work that they do and our production team to thank Nick and Dana and Aiden and Gianluca who really support us, you know, seven days, 24 hours a day. So again, thank you.

1:25:34Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And Peter, thank you for pulling all this together and forcing us into this conversation. I think it's kicking and screaming in some cases, but it's magnificently important for the world. And hopefully you guys all see the love that we share amongst ourselves. My favorite time of the week is spending time with my Moonshot mates. The average of five people, yeah, well, I get to hang out with smarter people than I am. All right, everybody, we're going to be doing this again in an evening session. If you want to come again, you're more than welcome to. And again, thank you. Hope to see you guys at Moonshots Live.

1:26:07You can go to moonshots.com to learn more. And yeah, come and meet us in person.

1:26:18Thank you.