Bitcoin’s Bull Run & the AI Arms Race: What You Need to Know w/ Salim Ismail | EP #166

0:00The price of Bitcoin is back up above 90 ,000. It's pretty binary. Either Bitcoin or those Dezera goes through a million dollars of Bitcoin. There's no real middle ground. The only question is when either of those happen. It's not that we've just gotten smarter. It's the tools that we have. It's AI that can help us understand what's going on. You'll soon have a Jarvis -type personal AI that will have access to all of that, sitting next to you. Google's got access to all of the street view data, massive amount, Google Earth, YouTube, all of that is very real world data that can be trained on. Well also we're not even touching the deep web where you have so much data in databases, right?

0:38The amount of information on the crawlable web is very limited. The speed at which this portray's acceleration over the next five years is even a hard for me to have them. Now that's the moonshot ladies and gentlemen.

0:56Everybody welcome to moonshots in our episode of WTF just happened in tech this week. I'm here with Saleem, Ismail, my buddy. Saleem, good morning, it's an early morning here recording this, but a lot's been happening in the tech world and excited to get it out. How are you doing today? I'm doing great and And there's so much happening. It kind of gets overshadowed with all the chaos happening in the global world, but the tech world is moving unbelievably quickly. Yeah. No, for sure. And while the, I don't want to say it, but I do believe the tech world's far more important in the final result for the long term.

1:34Big time. All right. Let's jump in. You know, one of my strike force members, Max Song, just landed in Beijing for some meetings. and he sent me this photograph on the left. And this is what you see in the Beijing airport. It's basically China going all in on robots and AI. And then what you see at JFK airport, which I recently went through is basically fashion ads. And there's something here that is important just to point out, right? I'm, this is, you know, part of China's growing culture is super tech forward much more. What do you think about this? I think that's exactly right. And, you know, they're facing a massive population crisis.

2:25So they actually need the robust to automate the workforce. Otherwise, they won't be anything but you left to do the work over the next decade or two. So they don't have much choice. But for me, the underlying irony here was that the ads for off -floor and or say Gucci or whatever. It's one of my boys here. Oh, yeah, man. I see him. I sure got fired up here.

2:47The underlying thing here, all the Ralph Laurener, Gucci or whatever, all the handbags or the Berking bags are all made in China anyway. I thought that was a kind of an interesting segue for this particular slide. But they're focusing heavily on it and they have to. And it's going to be amazing to see as they roll that out. It's going to infect and spread across the whole world about Perda. Yeah, we hear a lot about optimists and figure here and digit and Apollo and X1. There's an equal probably greater number of robots in your development in China because they are the government is really, you know, supporting the development.

3:25I think we're going to start to see this. In our last couple of episodes, we talked about the Google Wing where they can deliver something by drone, right? We're all like, oh my god. And I got a ping from one of my people over there going, we've been doing this for years, what are you guys talking about? So it's like, so the future is here, just not evenly distributed. This is another one that I wanted to share here today, and those of you who are listening versus watching, this is a graphic on the latest AI models IQ test results. And this is a distribution of human IQ that goes on the far left from 50 to the far right to super genius of 160.

4:11Of course, the average human IQ is 100 by definition. And what we've seen over the last couple of years was the rise of the large language models on this IQ scale. About 18 months ago, it was Claude 3 that reached 101 IQ first. And then we saw GPT -01 get to, I think it was 120. And on this distribution curve, what we're seeing here is, again, open AI leading the way with their O3 model, at somewhere like an IQ of 133. the Gemini just behind that Gemini 2 .5 and IQ like 127. Pretty extraordinary. What do you think here? I mean, you look at that spectrum and you're exactly mirroring the global human collective, right?

5:10A few on the right, a few on the left and a cluster in the middle. The big difference of course is, yeah, we'll continue to shift towards the right and humans will be mostly stuck in the middle with all of the arcakes, things that we consider and deal with with our little one liter, one half liter brain in the small cavity. It sounds like a little fiat car with a little engine in it. Let's check. You know, just some references here were, again, the O3 models that it looks like 133 on this map. Obviously, it's not accurate, but or exactly accurate. But a genius level IQ on Mensa, I think, would you say, Selim is like 140?

5:54Yeah, Mensa candidacy comes out of 140. That's considered genius level. I think somebody mentioned, Donna mentioned that Einstein has one, had 160. Right? I just want to make about do my normal commentary here and say that this is great, but it still feels to me that there's so much more that we could be thinking about in terms of measuring decision -making, emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many other clients. I know we have a couple of common certatories on the slide, so I'll do it later, but the IQ test is a one piece of it. It's great. We'll all have a genius in our bedroom.

6:29And what's great about this is typically, if you want to deal with somebody with 140 K genius, they have no patience for fools and they're hard to deal with socially, whereas the ARs will be easy to deal with socially because you'll be able to train them that way. So that's the most exciting part for me around this. Yeah, and I think one of the points you made earlier that's important to realize is there is no artificial limit. As IQ becomes more intelligent, it just continues becoming more intelligent. And there's going to be a point at which the idea of a Mensa IQ score is meaningless as these things hit IQs of 200, 500, 1000.

7:05God knows what that means. Yeah. And do two AIs of 160 each adopt a 320? That's a question I'd like to ask them. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late, you can watch the entire abundance summit online by going to exponentialmastery .com. That's exponentialmastery .com.

7:47All right, let's go on to our next slide here. The question is, you know, and I'm often asked this, who is leading the AI race, right? And there are two answers worth pointing out. The first is today on almost every metric, Google's Gemini 2 .5 is dominating. And here's a slide I just put together with AI analysis, intelligence, index. We see, you know, again, these are, these models are all so close, but you know, Gemini 2 .5 is out and lead the the output tokens per million, the price of input and output. And then of course, the most interesting metric, at least from a conversational standpoint, is called humanity's last exam on reasoning and knowledge.

8:45I find this fascinating. What do you think about that? I mean, look at it. Some level we should be human beings should be very bad at this because if you look at the aggregate knowledge of human beings scientific inquiry over the centuries, there's a staggering amount of data that we have in the world. I remember doing, coming up with a single random list of 12 doctoral thesis that were defended at my alma mater, Waterloo. And I couldn't figure out for half of them what even the subject area was there was so detailed and specific right and so The fact that an AI has instant access to all of that is incredible and we will be able to answer any question And I think I'll go back to the point that you'll soon have a Jarvis type Personal AI that will have access to all of that sitting next to you and so therefore any any question and when you look at what human last exam, it's a list of almost random test questions across quantum physics and archaeology and biology.

9:52And it's the sort of the sort of exam that you have nightmares about in a labor on. That's right. I might actually be able to pass on my thermodynamics exams for my You still have words about going back and like like I missed that class and the finals are coming up. There was I'll give you a quick anecdote here. There was one like then we had. It was a three hour exam. Okay, and the exam question was a satellite at altitude A is orbiting the earth. There's a river underneath that's long north to south. It's big right? The because of the rotation one bank of the water on one bank of the river slightly behind the other, work out which bank and my how much.

10:36And I did like, there was like two lines in this exam and I had to turn it over going, sorry, I think I missed a page. Where's the rest of this exam question? And that was it. I radically, I did then assume a satellite orbiting it, a thing A and work out or trying to still have nightmares about that. It was just a horrible exam. It must be a kind of hell. It must have a hell that I don't ever want to Yeah, counter. And this is why you need the AI. I said the S to you going, yeah, you're work that out for me and come back to me with the answer, right? So today, just to summarize here, today, Google Gemini 2 .5 is dominating, at least in performance metrics.

11:14But here's another metric, which is revenues inside. Yeah. And this category, open AI is trouncing the competition. So, you know, you got to give them unbelievable credit, right? For we're democratizing and opening up the kind, creating a total category out of nothing. And the fact that they're making this much money is just so, so awesome. It should be an unbelievable testament for any startup founder saying, could I make a difference in an area where you've got Google, Microsoft, Metta, all playing, and these guys come along and completely crap the whole thing open. And I'm actually dominating on the revenue side.

11:56I think it's just a great testament to the beginner's mind, the founder mode, all of that stuff. Why startups will always be the best, from now on, will be the best mode of building and bringing you ideas in the market. So let me ask you a question here. There are two points I want to make on this one. The first is that if you remember, Google really was in the lead on AI ahead of everybody. Yeah. And they chose not to roll it out on the open internet because of safety concerns, right? There was sort of an unspoken point that, you know, AI needs to be properly controlled. And then open AI comes out and is just like, lays it all out there and Google is playing catch up.

12:45So I'm curious if, how much of this is first mover advantage? The second point is I spoke about in my book with Stephen Contler, I think it was in bold the idea of a user interface moment. The idea when a piece of software makes a complex technology so easy to use. The very first user interface moment that I noted was Mosaic when Andreessen put Mosaic as a browser on top of ARP and then all of a sudden the number of websites explodes. And chat GPT is a user interface moment on top of the GPT miles. I think that's right. You're talking about that when you go from the deceptive to disruptive, right?

13:32Yeah. There's an inflection point in usability. The two that I use the most is the iPhone made the smartphone kind of usable. The Nokia's were pretty clunky before then. And Coinbase made Bitcoin purchasable easily with a click of a button. and boom, it took off. So when you can make a complex technology a simple and usability, if you look at say NFTs is very complex to kind of buy an NFTs, still way the usability is way off and therefore it hasn't hit mainstream yet. This is the hardest part of technology is making something deceptively simple, right? I remember when we were designing products, a Yahoo, I've got the graphics guys, they would spend like the graphics designer guys would spend hours and hours and hours trying to figure out how to reduce the pixels on the screen and just move it a little bit over and you go What the hell is this like a big deal, but it turns out that there's an unbelievable A big effect.

14:27Just a quick story here when we had the Yahoo Mail homepage it turned out if you move the send button by five pixels over to the right usage dropped off a cliff. Oh, come on It's true. We had the data They were like we can't change this goddamn interface because people are so used to having it right there That they they click it and then they move to a different screen because they think they've sent it and then they get pissed off later So that we can't move that sandbox never As you got anchored in the usability of the psyche of the user base And so it's just such a weird psychological thing that goes on Therefore you almost have to have a totally new model like open AI Has to be the one that cracks it open And we've seen this repeatedly.

15:10There's a reason that the electric car was created by Tesla and popularized by Tesla and not by the major car manufacturers. They're all coming at it from a car with sensors rather than software with wheels. And so on this chart here, what we're seeing is, this is the end of December 2024, right? And this does not even include the massive gains that OpenAI has seen in the past four months. But we're seeing open AI at like 2 .5 billion of revenue and in Gemini at just under a half a billion, right? Five times less revenue for Gemini and then on the topic below that. This reminds me very much of what we saw with Google and Bing in the search space, right?

15:55Where there's people just become, you know, it's interesting. We humans tend to like pick something and stick with it. and the cost of changing is so difficult. Yeah. And you know, they declared Google and Monopoly and Eric would make Eric Schmidt would make the point to look at there's five other search engines and anybody could, we're one click away from obscurity, right? We have to stay on the cutting edge and you're gonna give OpenAI credit for rolling out new features at a constant basis and iterating the product very fast. They recently announced all the memory stuff which I think is really cool.

16:30Yeah, that is interesting, right? So there's basically infinite memory where open a eyes Systems will remember all of your conversations and one of the fun things to do is to go on open a island on chat GPT You know the O3 model whatever model and say tell me about me right and and no but seriously it's up You know I did that on Groc as well and Groc was I don't know about you. I'm saying you know or yes you do, and says, well, you have to give me permission to look at your ex posts, which was interesting. I would have imagined that GROC would not have had that requirement, but it did. All right, let's move on here.

17:13One of the big areas that Google slash alphabet is leading with deep mind is the whole area of the impact of AI on medicine and biology. And there was recently, a 60 minutes episode where Demis Hassabis, actually served Demis Hassabis since he's been knighted, or Dr. Hassabis as the case may be, was interviewed and the conversation was around the impact of AI on disease, ending disease, and leading to radical abundance. So I love the fact that the term abundance is now becoming sort of the topic to sure. Did you see the CBS interview? I did. And I think it goes right online with the conversations we've had, right?

18:06When you have all the data coming off our bodies, like we used to measure the human being with four metrics. Heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels, maybe, you know. And I have like 40 different streams of data by all the wearables and your coherent state and your VO2 max and Lord knows what. And once you pour that into an AI and it starts correlating that with different medical conditions, it's going to do a hundred times better job in real time than any doctor could ever do. So now you've got a real time AI doctor living with you inside you. So this is like game changing for catching stuff early, which is 99 % of the deal with some of these endemic diseases.

18:50And then finding amazing treatments for breakthrough things along with CRISPR. This is why I think the work, the conversation that we had last week with Ben Lamb is blew my mind up still reeling with that conversation because they're building all the fundamental tool sets to go and edit DNA and edit genomes and edit cells and all the biological hacking and make a complete suite of tools, right? Where the human body with 50 trillion cells that's governed each cell by the DNA is essentially a software engineering problem. And that just, it's just a huge paradigm shift. By the way, if you're listening, you haven't heard the interview that Sleeman I did with Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal, please listen to it.

19:34It's extraordinary. We talked about the dire wolves being brought back, But that's a minority of the story. We're going to talk about synthetic biology, the impact on the ecology, what it's going to take to bring back dozens of different species. And can you bring back dinosaurs? And what would you do to bring back dinosaurs? Anyway, a lot of fun conversations. So check it out. Two things to spoilers for that one. Although you cannot ever bring back dinosaurs, which I found totally fascinating, but you can simulate a dinosaur. You can simulate a dinosaur. You can basically take chicken or reptilian current, and then you can add the genes for the traits that the dinosaurs had.

20:20So it's not bringing it back from the original DNA, but I do love the idea of engineering. It's being you species. It would be sort of like new -vaux dinosaur.

20:36And we talked about the fact that we have an old word for this. We call it breeding, right? We've for thousands of years we've been crossing dogs and cats and horses to select for the traits that we want. We've just gone from the digital photography to film photography to digital photography, cool. And and now we can do it all in software and not have to create mutants strains that we have to deal with afterwards, etc. There's one thing that I just don't want reflect on, well, I thought super impressive, was the fact that they have for every project that they consider a team of ethicists, colossal bioscience has a team of ethicists for every project looking at the ethical and moral considerations of this, which I thought was really profound and really a really great point to the fact that they have an MTP and that ethics are built into the model there.

21:24And this is something I think we could bring into the AI world a lot more. Let me show a clip of Demis, an amazing man. I'll actually see him this coming week. I'm at the time, 100 awards were announcing the winner of the $100 million Musk carbon X prize, right? And that will happen. And Demis is one of the covers of Time magazine this month. So he'll be there looking for it seeing him, but check out this interview of Demis and his commentary about basically eliminating all disease in the next decade. Now, 10 years and billions of dollars to design just one drug. We could maybe reduce that down from years to maybe months or maybe even weeks, which sounds incredible today, but that's also what people used to think about protein structures.

22:14It would revolutionize human health, and I think one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI. The end of disease? I think that's been really rich, maybe within the next decade or so. I didn't see why not. It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, during this extraordinary time, where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding. It was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health.

22:54And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a found upload. You know, a found is one of the most advanced diagnostics in therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that AI system is able to look at the catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular and cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So found is one of my keys. I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because you know, I help this in you wealth.

23:38But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a viarite. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics, who's actually developed in New Mexico, at the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon. and their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing, which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best food to eat?

24:23Or what food should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and Viom really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me? And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good, when you look yourself in the mirror, saying, I feel great about life is so important. And so a product I use every day twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your looking appearance.

25:14So for me these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. So, you know, I just put out a blog this week and on this subject and the blog title basically was saying, listen, I get criticized all the time for talking about longevity, escape velocity, that it's coming and your job is to live an extra 10 years, make it for the next decade in good health. Yeah, don't get hit by a bus. Yeah, don't get hit by anything. And what I quote is Demis' commentary here, but also Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, you know, about three months ago, he's online at Davos speaking about being able to double the human lifespan potentially in the next five to ten years.

26:15And so, you know, it's not that we're just gotten smarter. It's the tools that we have. It's AI that can help us understand what's going on. You know, there's a big moral freak out that happens here, right? Because every single human being in the history of the planet has died, every living being, we're birthed for death in a sense, so that the species can evolve. And we're kind of coming close to breaking through that cycle, and people go, well, that's a -da -da -da -da -da -da. I think the same parallel applies to the the Ben Lamb, BioScience, the extension conversation, we're building the tool sets to have the choice, right?

26:51And maybe the most important conversation, because I struggled with this when we first got to, we were doing singularity and people were going, oh, we could have life extension. And I was like, wait, there's a huge moral implications of that. And I think you were framed as saying, wouldn't you like to have the longest health span possible? Then everything clicks in. Then it makes sense. Now you have the tool sets available for that kind of extension. and everybody wants to have a much longer healthier life. Yeah. All right, let's move on here.

27:21Here's an article that appeared this week. The title is Anthropics Claude, AI, reveals its own moral compass in 700 ,000 conversations. So what the team did here is basically look at 300 ,000 and anonymized conversations to understand what were the values that clawed, in this case probably clawed 3 .7, were exhibiting. And I'm really happy to see what the values were. And I'll just read this for those who are listening. It says, five broad value categories emerged, bringing practical, in the words helpful, epistemic meaning accuracy, social, being empathic, protective, safety, and personal authenticity.

28:20So, I don't, I think this was a clickbait title, but I think the notion is that, you know, our AIs are able to maintain a moral code. What do you think about this, Liam? two things are thoughts occurred to me. One is it's amazing and great that we can look at a broad number of conversations and bring and extract out of that these categories, right? These are very human categories, helpfulness, empathy, authenticity, etc. And it gives you a foundation for how AIs could operate because they could look at these categories and go, okay, we want to do, I'm a a hospital AI, I want to be really helpful, right?