Financializing Super Intelligence, Amazon's $50B Late Fee | #235

5 Mar 2026 · 2 h 17 min · 72 chapters

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In short

Podcast Episode Notes: Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Episode #235

Overview Podcast Title: Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Episode Title: Financializing Super Intelligence, Amazon's $50B Late Fee Recorded On: March 3rd, 2026 Description: The hosts explore the rapid advancements in AI and its implications, including Amazon's substantial investment in OpenAI and the evolving landscape of AI safety and governance.

Key Participants

  • Peter H. Diamandis, MD: Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360.
  • Salim Ismail: Founder of OpenExO.
  • Dave Blundin: Founder & GP of Link Ventures.
  • Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross: Computer scientist and founder of Reified.

Episode Structure

  1. Introduction to AI Developments
  2. Amazon's Investment: Amazon proposes a $35 billion investment in OpenAI contingent on their public offering and achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
  3. Concept of Financializing Superintelligence: Discussion on how AI capabilities are being monetized and the implications for entrepreneurs.
  1. Anthropic's Policy Shift
  2. Anthropic Changes Safety Policy: Anthropic rescinds its 2023 pledge to avoid training advanced AI without guaranteed safety, reflecting the pressures of competition.
  3. Concerns About Safety: Discussion among hosts about the potential dangers of AI and how various companies are racing to advance capabilities without adequate safety measures.
  1. The Dangers of the AI Race
  2. Historical Context: Comparisons made to historical tech shifts (e.g., Google's early ethical stance against data collection).
  3. Regulatory Challenges: The implications of rapid advances in AI technology outpacing the development of regulations and governance.
  1. AI and Economic Impacts
  2. Potential Job Losses: The hosts discuss impending job losses due to AI capabilities and the societal implications of these changes.
  3. Forecasts on Company Valuations: Predictions about companies like Anthropic potentially reaching valuations of up to a quadrillion dollars.
  1. AI in Everyday Life
  2. Emergence of AI Tools: The introduction of tools like Claude and the impact of AI on various sectors including finance, HR, and customer service.
  3. Automation of Tasks: Discussion of autonomous systems like Pulsia AI and their implications for businesses.
  1. Conclusion and Future Outlook
  2. Predictions for AI's Role: Speculation on how AI will shape industries, with a focus on healthcare, economic models, and innovation in every facet of life.
  3. Call to Action: Encouragement to viewers to think critically about how they engage with AI and the evolving technological landscape.

Key Takeaways

  • Financialization of Intelligence: AI capabilities are being treated as tradable assets, which could reshape the economic landscape drastically.
  • Ethics and Regulation: The discussion highlights the necessity for robust governance frameworks to prevent misuse and ensure safety as AI technologies evolve rapidly.
  • AI's Societal Integration: The implications of AI in everyday tasks, from healthcare to business operations, might lead to significant changes in how society functions.

Insights

  • The hosts noted that the potential for AI to disrupt traditional business models is immense, and organizations need to pivot rapidly to adapt.
  • There is a significant discussion about how human cognitive biases and outdated governance models could hinder the effective implementation of AI technologies.
  • The episode emphasizes that as AI becomes more integrated into daily life, individuals and organizations must be proactive in understanding and leveraging these technologies responsibly.

Discussion Points for Future Episodes

  • The implications of AI on personal privacy and data security.
  • The potential for AI to drive new industries and economic models.
  • How societal values and ethics will shape the future landscape of AI development.

Resources

  • Livestream the Abundance Summit: [Abundance360 Livestream](https://www.abundance360.com/livestream)
  • Subscribe to Peter’s MetaTrends Newsletter: [MetaTrends Newsletter](https://diamandis.com/metatrends)

Connect with the Hosts

  • Peter Diamandis: [X](https://x.com/PeterDiamandis)
  • Salim Ismail: [X](https://x.com/)
  • Dave Blundin: [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com)
  • Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross: [Website](https://www.reified.com/) | [X](https://x.com/)

---

*These notes provide a comprehensive overview of discussions held in the episode, presenting key themes, insights, and takeaways for listeners interested in the future of technology and its impact on humanity.*

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Amazon's Contingent Offer to OpenAI

0:00 to 0:12

Discussion on Amazon's significant financial offer to OpenAI contingent on AGI.

“Amazon makes a contingent offer to put$35 billion into OpenAI based upon them first off going public and secondly achieving AGI.”

The Financialization of Superintelligence

0:12 to 0:30

Exploration of how superintelligence is being viewed through a financial lens.

“The OpenAI to Microsoft definition of AGI was something like generating$100 billion in either earnings or revenue, I forget.”

Entrepreneurial Opportunities in AI

0:30 to 0:55

Discussion on the immense entrepreneurial potential within the AI sector.

“At some point, the circular economy becomes indistinguishable from the real economy.”

Current AI News Overview

1:18 to 1:54

Overview of the latest AI news stories from various companies.

“Gentlemen, another week, we've gotten to a cadence of two of these per week, and it feels like we're always leaving so many stories on the table.”

Anthropic's Policy Changes

1:54 to 2:49

Discussion on Anthropic's revision of its AI training policies amid competition.

“Anthropic revises responsible scaling policy amid increased competition.”

Historical Context of Safety in AI

2:49 to 3:50

Exploring the history of safety in AI and its implications for current practices.

“You know, a lot of us looked at Anthropic as the most responsible party out there, them and Google.”

The Slippery Slope of AI Ethics

3:50 to 5:00

Discussion on how competitive pressures can erode ethical standards in AI.

“And Google was going to be the force of good in all of tech.”

Competition vs. Safety in AI Development

5:00 to 6:14

Debate on whether competition helps or hinders safety efforts in AI development.

“Your earlier commentary, Dave, was really spot on.”

The Role of Collective Human Efforts in AI Safety

6:14 to 7:30

Exploration of the need for collective human efforts to ensure AI safety.

“Competition is how we guarantee that there isn't going to be a singleton that dominates the future light cone with superintelligence.”

Elon Musk's Perspective on AI Alignment

7:30 to 8:38

Discussion of Elon Musk’s views on achieving safety and alignment in AI.

“I don't see the mechanism for any kind of emergent property around it here.”
Show all 72 chapters

The Implications of Unregulated AI

8:38 to 9:50

Exploring the potential consequences of unregulated AI development and consumerism.

“And you saw this with that Anthropic Super Bowl ad that we showed in the pod a couple.”

Anthropic's Business Evolution

9:50 to 11:06

Discussion on how Anthropic's focus has shifted from safety to capabilities.

“especially for the consumer first companies that are needing to generate revenue.”

Anthropic's Position in the Market

11:06 to 12:20

Analysis of Anthropic's current market situation and future prospects.

“I also think even in the DNA of Anthropic, Anthropic was originally, recall, was originally founded as an exodus of open AI employees who were purportedly concerned about safetyism or lack thereof at open AI.”

AI's Role in Modern Warfare

12:20 to 13:34

Exploration of how AI is becoming a significant factor in geopolitical strategies.

“Anthropic, where does Anthropic stand right now in that whole conversation?”

AI and Geopolitical Influences

14:01 to 16:22

Explore how AI is reshaping geopolitical strategies and the urgency for regulations.

“I was just going to say, maybe not even just a means to an end, but also depending on which analysis of the Iranian situation you subscribe to may be an end to an end as well.”

The Need for AI Regulations

16:23 to 18:10

Discuss the necessity of establishing frameworks for AI use amidst rising capabilities.

“Please go ahead, but I just want to say one thing.”

Anthropic's Claude Advancements

18:37 to 21:04

Delve into the new features of Anthropic's Claude and its implications for productivity.

“So Anthropic expands Claude's agentic capacity.”

Democratization of Compute Power

21:05 to 22:41

Analyze the impact of decentralized compute power on individual agency and innovation.

“Note the agency of an individual developer with a Mac Mini and running Quen locally and OpenClaw has unbelievable agency and decentralization now.”

Challenges of AI Integration

22:42 to 25:53

Examine the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into existing workflows.

“I think it's an interesting step in the direction of councils for everything.”

Anthropic's Enterprise AI Strategy

25:54 to 28:00

Understand how Anthropic's new AI plugins are transforming enterprise software.

“or you're going to be spending all your time checking the work before you hit publish.”

The Rise of Autonomous Workflow Networks

28:00 to 29:25

Exploring the shift from human-centric to agentic workflows and its market impact.

“Not so much chatbots, but autonomous workflow networks.”

The Opportunity Amidst Hyper Deflation

29:25 to 31:09

Discussing how hyper deflation affects entrepreneurial valuations and market opportunities.

“Alex, I think the interesting point here is a year ago, if you had delivered this as an entrepreneur, you'd be out in the market raising at multi-billion dollar valuations.”

Adapting Large Companies to Rapid Change

31:09 to 34:18

Advice for large companies on setting up AI-native structures to remain competitive.

“but opportunity is bigger, not smaller overall.”

The Innovator's Dilemma in a Rapidly Changing World

34:18 to 35:18

Understanding the enduring relevance of disruptive innovation theories in today's fast-paced environment.

“more effectively with hordes of little agents, two layers, strategic layer and an execution layer.”

Shifts in Model Parameters and Capabilities

35:18 to 37:03

Insights into the evolution of AI models and their implications for the future.

“Yeah, you're either the disruptor or you're disrupted.”

The Future of Knowledge Work and AI

37:03 to 39:32

Exploring the future potential of AI in knowledge work and its implications for businesses.

“flash model, they don't advertise the parameter count, so it's not as viciously obvious as it is when a Chinese frontier lab launches an open-weight model.”

The Implications of Local Models in AI

39:32 to 42:00

Discussing the impact of localized AI models on industry and society.

“The first person I heard speak about this was actually Imad Moustak speaking about what you can get onto your phone.”

The Potential of AI in Dangerous Applications

42:00 to 43:00

Exploration of AI's capabilities and concerns about its misuse.

“On the other hand, lots of rumors that this time around, finally, with Gemini integration, they're on the critical path and they'll finally launch something.”

Historical Context and Modern AI

43:00 to 44:10

Comparison of AI advancements to historical developments in nuclear technology.

“What do you think is going on at the White House, in Congress, in the Department of War?”

The Role of Self-Regulation in AI

44:10 to 45:00

Discussion on self-regulation in AI and comparisons to financial services.

“The researchers over at Anthropic are brilliant.”

Challenges in AI Regulation

45:00 to 46:40

Debate on the feasibility and urgency of AI regulation.

“Still concerning to have this level of capability offline.”

Positivity Amidst Caution: The Ratio of Good to Bad

46:40 to 48:10

Analyzing humanity's nature through eBay and Craigslist examples.

“And defensive co-scaling of making sure that the most flops are going to good purposes rather than bad purposes.”

Innovations in AI Image Generation

48:10 to 49:20

Introduction to Google's new image generation model, Nano Banana 2.

“And the amplitude of the negative is getting bigger and bigger as people can run these models.”

The Future of Commercial Photography in AI

49:20 to 51:20

Implications of AI on photography and creative industries.

“that's a price point that's cheaper than stock images.”

Advancements in AI Task Automation

51:20 to 53:00

Discussion on Gemini's capabilities for automating tasks on Android.

“Every pixel is going to be AI-generated at the end of the day.”

The Evolution of AI on Mobile Devices

53:00 to 56:00

Examination of how AI functionality on mobile devices is changing user experience.

“And it used to be my current workflow, my previous workflow was I'd go to Google Images and hope I found something.”

The Evolution of Personal Assistants

56:00 to 57:28

Explore the historical context and technological advancements behind personal assistants.

“And before Siri, this is what the DARPA personal assistant that learns, or PAL, was supposed to deliver.”

Financializing AGI: Amazon's Bold Moves

57:28 to 58:55

Discuss Amazon's investment strategies in AI and the implications of AGI as a financial milestone.

“So you'll have less friction in consumer flows.”

Market Dynamics and AI Infrastructure

58:55 to 1:03:07

Analyze the competitive landscape of AI infrastructure and the relationships between major tech companies.

“So maybe we need to coin like AGI as a unit of currency, like an AGI is$100 billion of earnings or something.”

Future of Autonomous Companies

1:03:07 to 1:09:59

Delve into the concept of companies run by AI and the potential for single-person conglomerates.

“He loves— Yeah, and it's interesting that the big, big money we saw with Anthropic is in the corporate use case, corporate white-collar use case.”

The Rise of Agentic Hosting Systems

1:10:02 to 1:11:29

Explore the emergence of AI-driven systems that facilitate company operations at minimal costs.

“It may not be this one, but definitely these are going to be agentic hosting systems where you log a brand.”

Algorithmic Trading and Its Implications

1:11:30 to 1:11:55

Discuss the rise of algorithmic trading and its potential parallels in other sectors.

“We still have human traders manually fat fingering trades into the public securities markets.”

AI Voice Assistants in Fast Food

1:11:56 to 1:13:31

Examine the implementation of AI voice assistants in fast food chains with a focus on efficiency.

“And of course, Pulsia AI is one, probably, of many that will be materializing.”

AI as Empowerment or Surveillance?

1:13:32 to 1:14:56

Analyze the dual nature of AI in the workplace, from coaching tools to surveillance systems.

“The only thing that video didn't capture is how encouraging and enthusiastic the AI is.”

The Inevitable Rise of Automation

1:14:57 to 1:16:40

Discuss the inevitability of automation in various industries and its social implications.

“I'm waiting for it to say, so you dropped the fries for the third time this morning?”

The Future of Energy and Data Centers

1:22:27 to 1:24:00

Discuss the growth in utility-scale energy capacity and the impact of solar technology.

“I'm going to be joined by Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Kotler, Dave, and AWG on May the 4th.”

Promoting Book Sales

1:24:00 to 1:24:28

Learn about a book promotion event and its impact on community engagement.

“So I'm excited to have Ray there for four or five hours.”

Shifts in Energy Generation

1:24:30 to 1:26:08

Discover how solar energy is becoming more cost-effective than fossil fuels.

“plans to add a record 86 gigawatts of utility scale capacity this coming year.”

AI and Energy Needs

1:26:12 to 1:27:12

Understand the energy demands of AI and how they will be met.

“Remember when Eric Schmidt said, it was only a year ago, said AI is going to require 100 gigawatts by 2029.”

Tech Giants and Energy Independence

1:27:13 to 1:28:54

Explore how tech companies are moving towards self-sustaining power solutions.

“Tech giants to self-fund their production of power.”

Innovations in Energy Systems

1:28:54 to 1:30:47

Learn about new advancements in energy storage and generation technologies.

“I think what's really wonderful here is that in the past, you used to have to have government making these big infrastructure investments to push the world forward.”

AI Chip Production Dynamics

1:30:47 to 1:33:08

Examine the evolving landscape of AI chip manufacturing and partnerships.

“It's ad-supported at most, otherwise free.”

Meta's Strategic Moves

1:33:08 to 1:37:44

Discover how Meta is adapting and investing in AI and chip production.

“So, you know, there were probably about 15 to 20 stories in this realm of hyperscalers, you know, just making deals between themselves.”

Introduction to Biotech and Health

1:38:00 to 1:38:20

Exploration of the intersection of AI and healthcare, emphasizing data and longevity.

“it could always, say, serve as a host for OpenAI or some other frontier lab.”

Success in Gene Therapy

1:39:15 to 1:43:40

A narrative on advancements in gene therapy, specifically prime editing and its implications.

“This is a gene therapy delivered by prime medicine.”

Investment in Longevity Industry

1:43:41 to 1:45:18

Insights into the financial growth of the longevity sector and the shift in healthcare focus.

“You know, we talk about solve everything.”

Cognition and Longevity Challenges

1:45:19 to 1:48:08

The importance of cognitive health in longevity and innovative approaches to brain health.

“How long until we talk of the Magnificent Seven, but Eli Lilly is, of course, the American counterpart to Novo Nordisk and at this point a good deal more successful.”

Cultural Perspectives on Longevity

1:48:09 to 1:50:16

A humorous take on perceptions of aging and longevity from a personal story at the Vatican.

“But there were two things that happened.”

AI in Health Management

1:50:17 to 1:52:06

The role of AI in healthcare, discussing a Chinese health app and future possibilities.

“Look, we have CRISPR coming along where you can edit your own hinge.”

AI Doctors in Healthcare

1:52:06 to 1:52:50

Explore how AI can enhance healthcare access and efficiency.

“And when Martin does something, he usually goes full on.”

Robotics Innovations from China

1:52:50 to 1:53:59

Discuss the advancements in robotics, including street cleaning and farming robots.

“And this comes out of China and Shenzhen.”

The Future of Robot Form Factors

1:53:59 to 1:55:14

Debate on the evolution of robot shapes and their market viability.

“if you remember electronic word processors prior to the development of PC, maybe the ill-fated Wang computer, for example, in the Boston area, do these dedicated form factors that aren't necessarily general purpose.”

eVTOLs and Urban Mobility

1:55:14 to 1:56:49

Examine the upcoming eVTOL taxis and their potential impact on urban transport.

“You know, the foundation model battle is going to be dominated by just a couple of massive winners, but the robotics and the physical instantiation market is going to have many, many, many successful companies.”

Safety and Future of Air Taxis

1:56:49 to 1:58:09

Discuss the safety and implications of autonomous flying cars.

“to get all of this physical instantiation of AI walking out of the data centers.”

Dyson Swarms and Energy Challenges

1:58:35 to 2:01:00

Analyze the concept of Dyson Swarms and the physics behind them.

“We're dropping these WTF episodes and the Moonshot podcast episodes at this point twice a week.”

Intent and AI Objectives

2:01:00 to 2:03:29

Discussion on the objectives of AI and the risks of improper design.

“We're going to take apart Mercury and Jupiter, maybe Saturn, we'll see about Saturn.”

Changing Your Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP)

2:03:29 to 2:05:28

Learn how to adapt your MTP throughout your career.

“You're betting, Peter, against the orthogonality thesis that it's possible to decouple intelligence level and objectives.”

Apple Chips and AI Landscape

2:05:28 to 2:06:00

Examine the role of Apple chips in AI and edge computing.

“And that gave birth to, you know, International Space University and SEDS and Zero-G and XPRIZE.”

Apple's AI Chips and Their Challenges

2:06:00 to 2:08:20

Discusses why Apple's M4 and M5 chips are underrepresented in AI discussions.

“Question number seven, why aren't Apple chips like M4 being discussed on the AI landscape?”

The South Korean Education Model

2:08:20 to 2:10:14

Explores the complexities behind South Korea's education success and its societal issues.

“Well, I want to take number eight just because, you know, one of my lifelong best friends who passed away, Jin-ho, was Korean.”

Human Psychology and Governance Challenges

2:10:14 to 2:12:01

Examines the impact of human evolutionary psychology on governance decisions regarding technology.

“If you're into science and technology, build, go, have at it.”

The Ineffectiveness of CAPTCHAs

2:12:01 to 2:13:13

Questions the continued use of CAPTCHAs in the face of advanced AI.

“From at Brock Stanford 7608, why do websites bother using CAPTCHAs when AI can beat any of them?”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Salim Ismail:Amazon makes a contingent offer to put$35 billion into OpenAI based upon them first off going public and secondly achieving AGI.

0:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It's kind of incredible that we've financialized superintelligence, which is amazing.

0:16Peter Diamandis:The OpenAI to Microsoft definition of AGI was something like generating$100 billion in either earnings or revenue, I forget.

0:24Salim Ismail:We're measuring compute in terms of gigawatts and AGI in terms of dollars, I love it. Amazon was philanthropic for a while. Now they're open AI.

0:34Peter Diamandis:At some point, the circular economy becomes indistinguishable from the real economy. And I think that's what we're seeing here.

0:40Dave Blundin:This is the entrepreneurial opportunity of a lifetime. We're talking about tens of thousands of times more capacity to create, more money, more value created. Abundance is going to be absolutely rampant. Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

0:59Salim Ismail:Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech, the number one podcast in AI and exponential technology, getting you ready for the future, getting you ready for the supersonic tsunami heading our way. I'm here with my extraordinary Moonshot mates, Salim Ismail, DB2, AWG. Gentlemen, another week, we've gotten to a cadence of two of these per week, and it feels like we're always leaving so many stories on the table. but let's do our best.

1:32Dave Blundin:Yes, we need to actually move faster and faster and faster, just like the singularity itself to keep up with everything.

1:39Salim Ismail:Well, no tech company waits, no GPU waits. All right, let's jump in. Our top AI news stories, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Uber, accelerating at an extraordinary speed of change. Our first story for today, Anthropic revises responsible scaling policy amid increased competition. This was a story I put to the top of the conversation because it's very significant. And I had Jared Kaplan on stage at the Abundance Summit last year, the year before. Alex, you know Jared well. I think he was a roommate. He was a year behind me in the Harvard physics graduate program. Yeah. What an amazing group of friends that you had.

2:26Salim Ismail:But here's the deal. They're dropping their 2023 pledge to not train advanced AI unless safety is guaranteed. And Jared's point, I think, logically, is if everyone else is rushing ahead, then us sort of hampering ourselves doesn't make any sense. And I want to discuss this because it's concerning. You know, a lot of us looked at Anthropic as the most responsible party out there, them and Google. Thoughts, gents? Well, you know, safety fails in exponential races. There's lots of thoughts, all of you at once. This is a metaphor for something, right?

3:05Peter Diamandis:We're going to race to talk about race condition.

3:07Salim Ismail:Love it. Oh, my God. Amazing. I want to open with Salim here. Salim, go ahead. Okay.

3:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Well, I mean, safety typically fails in exponential races. You could look at the whole thing writ large as open AI, cracked open, and let Pandora's box out. And so this is just the same type of dynamic occurring again. It speaks to the idea that technology is going to move at its pace, and we have to move our human structures at that pace. We can't fall behind.

3:35Dave Blundin:Yeah. Dave? Yeah, no, it's definitely history repeating itself. And so many of our MIT classmates went to Google back in 04, 05, 06, when it was don't be evil. Yeah. And they went there over Microsoft because everyone perceived Microsoft as being evil. And Google was going to be the force of good in all of tech. And then they bought YouTube and then they built Chrome. And then what they promised the engineers early on, the ones that I knew anyway, is, look, we will never store somebody's search history. How laughable is that in hindsight? So then they expanded out of search history. You know, we're going to store that for five years.

4:12Dave Blundin:But we're also going to launch Chrome. Now we're going to look at all of your browsing history. Then we're going to buy DoubleClick. Then we're going to run targeted ads based on everything. Then we're going to do Gmail and read every email. You know, Microsoft says they don't read your email, but Google says, well, we'll do what we want, but we won't pry too much. But they do read your email. And so that slippery slope of competition, you know, corrupts the original mission statement gradually over time. I gave a whole presentation in Davos on how this evolves. And Dario wants nothing more than some rules.

4:43Dave Blundin:Yeah. And he's actually legitimately pissed that he has to actually repeal his own ethical standards to be competitive because there are no rules. And, you know, this is exactly how it has to evolve.

4:57Salim Ismail:Because, you know, Dario is in a position where he has to choose between being irrelevant, which doesn't help, or repealing the original pledge, which he doesn't want to do.

5:06Dave Blundin:But it's better than being irrelevant. Totally.

5:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Your earlier commentary, Dave, was really spot on. And this is what Cory Doctorow calls in shitification, right? So people promise something and then they gradually degrade it over time. And by the end of it, it's a shit show. I love the way you encapsulate everything.

5:23Salim Ismail:There's no credible mechanism to slow the race right now. And so it's all out. Alex, what do you think about this?

5:31Peter Diamandis:I think there was no credible mechanism to guarantee safety in the first place. I think the entire premise was probably wrong. I think sort of the superficial gloss is, okay, We're in the Red Queens race, and this is the race condition that everyone 10 years ago was scared of finding the world in, where we have a number of frontier labs all racing to do the terrible thing, that you build the thing and everyone dies. I don't buy that at all. I don't think this premise that either a heroic individual or a heroic frontier lab was ever going to be in a position to guarantee safety. In fact, I remember back to the earlier days of the frontier labs where the concern and part of the reason why OpenAI was formed itself was concern of a singleton.

6:16Peter Diamandis:Competition is how we guarantee that there isn't going to be a singleton that dominates the future light cone with superintelligence. And I think similarly, the notion that there's going to be sort of unilateral safetyism where single heroic individual, like one of the more prominent AI doomers, or a very safety-oriented frontier lab is somehow going to ensure safety throughout the forward light cone, that was never going to happen. Safety, to the extent we get it, is going to come from competition. It's going to come, I think, from a balance of powers and a separation of powers. And I think what we want is competition between the frontier labs and maybe even to some extent competition between nation states, such as what we're seeing, to compete to do the best job for advancing humanity.

7:04Peter Diamandis:And I think any unilateral safetyism is probably a dead end.

7:08Salim Ismail:One of the questions is, will safety become an emergent property in some form or shape, right? So right now what we've seen is Anthropic go from a policy of we won't build it unless it's safe, that's been their policy, to we'll build it as safely as the competition is building theirs. And unfortunately, it's a slippery slope potentially down to the bottom.

7:30Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I don't see the mechanism for any kind of emergent property around it here.

7:35Salim Ismail:Well, we haven't seen the mechanism for emergent properties of what we've seen so far either.

7:38Peter Diamandis:Well, I would take the position that we are, that in some sense, again, the fundamental flaw, I think, in the thesis that safety would originate from a heroic individual or heroic organization is, I would argue, it takes an entire civilization to align a superintelligence. We took all of humanity's content online and used it in compressed form to pre-train AGI, baby AGI, in the early days, like summer of 2020 with GPT-3. Why wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that it will take all of humanity to defensively co-align and co-scale superintelligence as well? It's not going to come from a single lab.

8:17Salim Ismail:What do you think about Elon's point of view that we need to build ASI that is maximally truth-seeking as his mechanism for alignment and for safety?

8:31Dave Blundin:I think that's just a fraction of what's needed. That addresses a very specific issue, which is, look, we don't want the AI to have one religion or to have one perspective on how you should live. we want it to be truth-seeking and have all opinions in cap and we don't want to be censored so that's definitely a problem but it doesn't address the imminent job loss the imminent consumerism you know the AI people are conceding all of their most private information to the AI the same way they did with their Google search history and it's accumulating that data and people aren't fully aware of what it's gonna do it's gonna turn around start convincing you to do things and so if you don't have rules in place yeah the natural you know, profit motive of the AI companies is to start selling you things.

9:15Dave Blundin:And you saw this with that Anthropic Super Bowl ad that we showed in the pod a couple. Yeah, it was funny. Unbelievable. I've showed everybody that ad now, but this is exactly where it's going to go if there are no rules. And so I completely agree with Alex's perspective that 10 years from now, after we've solved all physics, we've solved all math, you know, we have global abundance, all of this is going to look silly 10 years from now. But in the three-year timeline, massive job loss, total confusion, and massive rampant AI sales consumerism that has no regulation around it right now. It's going to be an absolute cluster.

9:49Salim Ismail:Especially for the consumer, Dave, especially for the consumer first companies that are needing to generate revenue. Yeah. Yeah.

9:58Dave Blundin:Well, you know, I actually, after that last pod, you know, you showed that chart, Peter, that had Anthropic, you know, growing 10X year over year, 26 billion in revenue forecasted this year and on its current trend will be the first company to hit a trillion dollars in revenue in history by 2029, 2030. And exceed open AI this year. And exceed open AI this year. Crazy numbers. But I said on the pod, you know, that implies like a 30 trillion dollar valuation. But then I ran it through perplexity and it said, no, that implies a one quadrillion dollar valuation using the current market price earnings ratio.

10:33Dave Blundin:Yeah.

10:34Salim Ismail:We discussed this a few podcasts ago that we'll see the first $100 trillion companies before the end of this decade. Anyway, I think that this is a more honest policy for Anthropik, end of the day.

10:50Peter Diamandis:Pause-ism was never going to work. I mean, we all know a number of folks at MIT and otherwise who advocated for a six month pause just for the entire space to cool off and wait for safety to catch up. Did safety catch up? Whatever that means, not at all. If anything, that function does an accelerant to capabilities. I also think even in the DNA of Anthropic, Anthropic was originally, recall, was originally founded as an exodus of open AI employees who were purportedly concerned about safetyism or lack thereof at open AI. So they start a safety slash AI alignment oriented firm. Then they rapidly discover that the best way to do safety is to have your own models.

11:31Peter Diamandis:And they discover the best way to have your own models is to raise a bunch of money to train your own models. And then they discover the best way to raise money to train your own models is to generate revenue. And the cycle completes where, yet again, an alignment-oriented firm becomes a capabilities firm. This happens over and over again. I would argue at this point, alignment and capabilities are inseparable. There's like a deep duality there.

11:53Dave Blundin:Yeah. Did you see the new standard, by the way? It's Dario said, well, okay, we can't live by our original plan to not train advanced AI unless safety is guaranteed. So the new standard is we need to be as good or better than anyone else. It's like, wow, that's a very different bar.

12:11Salim Ismail:And we see, you know, recently with the whole Department of War debacle with Anthropic and OpenAI, OpenAI cuts the deal. Anthropic, where does Anthropic stand right now in that whole conversation?

12:24Peter Diamandis:they're in limbo i mean i i write about this every day in my newsletter anthropic is at the moment my understanding is they're in limbo they're probably in negotiation with the department of war but they're they're otherwise in limbo and and cut off as a supplier and considered i i'm not sure whether they've i think dario and others have made some formal statements that they haven't received anything in writing yet from the department of war but my understanding is that this administration is considering them a supply chain risk. And at the same time, notably, OpenAI struck a deal.

12:58Salim Ismail:Yeah. And at the same time, we hear that Anthropic was used by the Department of War to actually plan the attacks in Iran.

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13:06Dave Blundin:Well, one thing that's really, really, yeah, no, I mean, look, it's really clear that the people who control AI, the US government and otherwise can take out any world leader at any time now the combination of satellites ai to read every image and uh you know universal cameras it makes it possible to decapitate any country at any time we've proven that twice in the last quarter so the future of warfare is basically whoever controls ai chooses who gets to stay in power

13:34Salim Ismail:you know dave that's a really important point one of the things i've mentioned before is we're living in a world where you can know anything anytime anywhere right it's a it's a trillion sensor, you know, over a trillion sensor planet right now with drones, orbital satellites, autonomous vehicles, gathering data, and then AI doing predictive analytics on what things are likely to be, even if you don't have data for it. I'll tell you one other thing. Sorry, go to Docs.

14:03Peter Diamandis:I was just going to say, maybe not even just a means to an end, but also depending on which analysis of the Iranian situation you subscribe to may be an end to an end as well. If you look at Venezuela and the oil exports to China, and you look at Iran and the oil exports to China, the picture emerges, or at least one possible picture emerges, that what we're seeing is not just AI where Claude is being used to perform the Venezuelan operation, perform the Iranian operation as a means to some sort of arbitrary or nebulous geopolitical purpose, But actually, arguably, with China looming in the background and possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan and the risk to the semiconductor supply chain and Western AI that would cause, it may be the case that AI is also the end to the means to the end.

14:57Peter Diamandis:And that what we're seeing more broadly is, in some sense, superintelligence being used to protect the future of Western superintelligence.

15:05Dave Blundin:Yeah, and there's a window of opportunity, maybe a few months, to put some kind of structure around this globally. You'll see later in the podcast that the models are improving at this 3x, 4x reduction in parameter count, 10x increases in intelligence. Just every time we podcast, it's another step up. And we were already predicting, or I was anyway, that this is going to be 100x a year just in terms of raw parameter count. But I think that's the lower bound now, looking at how just the beginning of the year has progressed. So there's a window of time where the power of AI that percolates out to every country in the world is going to be ridiculous by the end of this year.

15:45Dave Blundin:You know, create any virus you want, create any nuclear weapon you want, just working with your AI agent. So there's a window where we can start thinking about regulations that register the AI use cases and agents and chips and processing before chaos breaks out. But you can see that that window is executable now because you saw Venezuela, you're seeing Iran. You know, clearly there's this tipping point happening right now where, you know, whether it's NATO or whether it's the United Nations or whether it's the U.S. Congress, some entity needs to start formulating some structure around this because it's happening this year.

16:21Salim Ismail:Yeah, I mean, people need to wake up. Please go ahead, but I just want to say one thing. People have to wake up to the fact that AI is the single most important force impacting everything. you know, every single element of humanity right now is going to be accelerated, reinvented by this. Salim, go ahead, please.

16:43Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Dave, it just struck me that you mentioned Congress, the UN, NATO, probably the three most toothless entities on the planet today. So the thought that they would actually get together and do something or anybody do anything, I think is low. I think we have to assume that it won't happen and look at the other side of that. One thing about the Anthropic case, there is a potential, I looked up an analysis, they do have a legal challenge potential because the way that that was classified is so ridiculous to make them an existential risk and all that supply chain risk, etc., that they have legal recourse to fighting that and they might win that.

17:23Dave Blundin:Yeah, the thing about the legal recourse is that that process is usually a three-year-long window, which is hilarious. It's ugly every way. It's ugly every way.

17:31Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:What I find really upsetting is that in this scenario, everybody loses. There's no winners in this.

17:37Dave Blundin:No, there's no framework and no rules. It's a lot like the NFL was back 20 years ago when the defensive coordinators would pay bounties to the linebackers to take out the quarterback. Like, just take him off the field. I don't care if you break his legs. And take the 15-yard penalty. Who cares? Because then he's done for the season. The NFL said, this is not good for business. We need some rules. You did not expect that pivot. Well, that's where we are with AI right now. It's like, hey. Agree. Forget it. I don't even want to go down that. All right.

18:07Salim Ismail:Let's continue with the anthropic story. Hey, everybody. You may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team. And every week, myself, my research team, study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these MetaTrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. I found this story pretty fascinating.

18:42Salim Ismail:So Anthropic expands Claude's agentic capacity. Two different sides of the equation here. Cowork gains scheduling, right? So this is a cron job. So Claude completes recurring tasks at specific times, for example, generating your morning briefing or spreadsheet updates or your Friday presentations. I mean, that element was very much what we saw in OpenClaw, right? And so it's interesting. And the second half of this is that Claude code has enabled remote control. So you can kick off a task on your terminal and pick it up on your phone. You can control it from the Claude app or from a URL. And I'm wondering, you know, this has probably been in the works for some time.

19:25Salim Ismail:So when Anthropic basically, you know, tried to do the kibosh on ClaudeBot, I'm wondering if that was because they had this in the works. Basically what OpenClaw has been doing is what Anthropic is just rolling out under a different approach.

19:44Peter Diamandis:Oh, for sure. I take Anthropic at their face that this was, or OpenClaw, I guess, that the challenge was more trademark-oriented than anything else. But I do think there, what have I been saying for weeks slash days at this point, that was distinctive about OpenClaw? It's the two things. It's headless, able to function autonomously for 24-7, and also that it's convenient to chat with via conventional messaging channels. And what do you see here with Cowork? Co-work is able to autonomously be scheduled headlessly. That's the headless part. And then remote control, that's the mobile messaging type part.

20:25Peter Diamandis:But I think both of these are half measures. I'm insufficiently motivated by each of these. I use Co-work from time to time, and I use Claude Code all the time. And neither of these, I think, is as compelling, at least conceptually, as a more open-claw-ish framework, where all of these are cleanly packaged. And I think my guess is Anthropic and OpenAI and all of the other bigs will be forced to release their own sort of first party OpenClaw competitor sometime in the next couple months.

20:57Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:There's something I found very profound about this plus our last conversation around OpenClaw and everything happening. I think I was thinking about over the last couple of days, something very profound is happening, which is the sheer democratization of compute power, right? Note the agency of an individual developer with a Mac Mini and running Quen locally and OpenClaw has unbelievable agency and decentralization now. Not controlled by any centralized authority, not controlled by any centralized command structure. They can essentially operate as they feel like. So this is an incredible independence and agency at the edge, which is going to really blow open innovation in a way that we can.

21:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Six Ds, baby.

21:39Salim Ismail:because of total democratization, total demonetization as we're seeing it happen

21:44Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:in cascading down, as Dave mentioned earlier, ironically from China.

21:48Peter Diamandis:Yeah, ironically, ironically from China.

21:51Dave Blundin:And then one other nugget, you know, Peter, your theory is a hundred percent right. You know, anthropic, what, why did an anthropic just throw out something better than open claw a year ago? It can and will delete things off your laptop. And so all these open claw users, including my kids, including me actually have separate laptops or separate Mac minis, including Alex Finn, in our podcast we just did. They run it on isolated hardware. Anthropic couldn't really contemplate throwing out a product, then say, yeah, but run it on separate hardware. How are you going to do that? So this creates a huge entrepreneurial opportunity, though.

22:24Dave Blundin:If you say, listen to what Alex said a second ago, OpenClaw is unbelievably compelling. And anyone who's started down that path will never go back, right? You'll never give up your Jarvis once you have a Jarvis.

22:35Salim Ismail:Have any of you played with Perplexity's computer?

22:40Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I've been hearing really good things. I've not tried it yet.

22:43Peter Diamandis:I looked at the demo. I think it's an interesting step in the direction of councils for everything. And I've had so many people over the past few months ask me for something like Perplexity's computer, where right now, if you have a given task, they'll manually go to the top three or four frontier models, ask them for independent opinions, and then try to synthesize that into one coherent whole. And that is essentially what Perplexity Computer tries to automate. There are others in this space as well. But I think even there, it's nice sort of sugar, syntactic sugar, if you will, around the existing models.

23:22Peter Diamandis:But I don't think it's transformative. I think ultimately, even this ability to counsel up or to create juries around lots of competing models, that's just going to be table stakes as with so many other forms of scaffolding. Did you just say syntactic sugar? It's a term of art in computer science.

23:40Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It goes way back.

23:41Salim Ismail:Alex, I think the point you made a minute ago is brilliant. And Dave, I think you were saying this as well. All of the big players, all the hyperscalers, all the frontier models are going to have to develop some version of OpenClaw because it's going to become the de facto, every person's going to have their own version of Jarvis.

24:01Peter Diamandis:Yes. But remember, it's really expensive, too. This is part of the reason, it's not the only reason, for running, say, Quen locally under an open-claw scaffold. That's a lot of compute. If you have one or more agents that are running constantly for you, I'm not sure Anthropic in its present state even has the cloud infra to be able to launch a product like that. And I think in many cases, Anthropic, OpenAI, the others, are probably just waiting around for their infra to catch up with applications like that before they launch it. Yeah, agreed.

24:31Dave Blundin:This is the entrepreneurial opportunity of a lifetime. Anybody who jumps in, and there's so many different versions, so many different things to play with. But when you go to J.P. Morgan, Justin Milligan, who just joined us, his division at J.P. Morgan was only allowed to use GPT-4. Wow. He's like, are you kidding me? And he couldn't take it. He's like, this is ridiculous. But no one has figured out, okay, but how can I use it in this highly secure, inside the firewall, inside J.P. Morgan environment? And Dario is not going to answer that question. And the open-claw team isn't going to answer that question.

25:04Dave Blundin:And they want everyone to thrive who uses their platforms. They don't want to kill every job. They want any early adopter to thrive as they thrive. And Dario, if he hits a quadrillion-dollar valuation, he doesn't need more money. He needs to not destroy every job in America or in the world. And so this is really entrepreneurial heaven if you can figure out, how do I get what I can use right here on my Mac Mini, and it can clearly solve all these problems, how do I get that inside a real-world use case without breaking everything, without regulatory problems? Many, many, many job opportunities in that team.

25:40Salim Ismail:One of the challenges still, even with Claude's agentic capacity, is giving AI recurring, unsupervised access to your workflows means that either they're going to be a bunch of errors or you're going to be spending all your time checking the work before you hit publish. It's still going to keep the human still in the loop to assure quality or alignment. There will be a point at which you trust it completely, but we're not there yet.

26:15Peter Diamandis:This is economics 101, or I should say microeconomics 101, one. When the cost of one good falls to near zero, the value of the complementary good increases. So as the value, or I should say, as the cost of generation of content becomes post-scarce, which is exactly what we're seeing, that increases the value of its complement, which is verification for now. For sure.

26:39Salim Ismail:All right, going to our next story, Claude, and keeping on the Claude theme, Claude Gaines co-work plug-in templates for finance banking and HR so this is fascinating right Anthropic is building enterprise agent marketplace it's department level AI infrastructure and it's taking down company after company after industry um what's you know we've seen uh just you know the decimation of uh of a number of players out there what are you thinking about this well

27:14Dave Blundin:I wouldn't interpret this as, you know, when Microsoft launches in an assault, like on the relational database, it's a big, you know, multi-billion dollar investment. Here, Anthropic can build these connectors and adapters, vibe code them in probably an hour. And anyone else can, too. So I wouldn't perceive it as, you know, Anthropic is taking over all banking software. It's just so easy to build the stuff now that you might as well roll out all that functionality. So I wouldn't overread into the intent behind it.

27:42Salim Ismail:I don't think it's intent. I'm just saying, you know, the implications are profound, though. So I've got two thoughts.

27:49Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:One is every department now becomes like a programmable intelligence layer. And basically all prescriptive logic in companies collapses into these AI agent roles. And the real prize here is enterprise orchestration. Not so much chatbots, but autonomous workflow networks. Because this is what I talked about last time. This is the organizational singularity. We go from human-centric approvals, hop to hop to hop, human to human to human, to agentic workflows with human beings doing oversight, dashboard monitoring, and exception handling.

28:24Peter Diamandis:A couple of comments on this one. If you actually look at what these plug-ins are that Anthropics is launching that are causing the so-called SaaSpocalypse and carving$1.5 trillion off of market caps of various software companies, they are absurdly simple. They're just a bunch of MCP, model control protocol wrappers, and a bunch of skills with a set of bullets for how to go about carrying out different job industry roles or labor categories. This is not that complicated. I'm reminded, remember the scene in The Matrix, the villain is busy unplugging people without their cooperation from The Matrix, killing them in the process.

29:07Peter Diamandis:And one of them says, not like this, not like this. That's basically what we're seeing, where these are just simple text files in many cases that are reducing single-handedly the market multiple, the trading multiple of entire industries. I think, on the one hand, it's incredible that a simple text file can, say, chop 10 % of the value off of a CRM firm, at least market value. On the other hand, as pointed out earlier, these plugins and the marketplaces of the plugins are so absurdly simple that I would reasonably expect these plugins are going to get just built in, since they're just scaffolding anyway, built into the next baseline version of the model and won't even need to exist independently in the future.

29:54Salim Ismail:Alex, I think the interesting point here is a year ago, if you had delivered this as an entrepreneur, you'd be out in the market raising at multi-billion dollar valuations.

30:06Peter Diamandis:It's called hyper deflation for a reason, Peter.

30:09Salim Ismail:I mean, I get it. I just want people to be aware that, you know, the moat for an entrepreneur coming forward with something amazing, that we're going to reinvent the entire HR industry or the investment banking industry and, you know, raising at a four or five billion dollar valuation. It's basically that moat's gone months or a year later.

30:32Dave Blundin:I think it's really important to step back and look at the macro every now and then and say, look, abundance is going to be rampant. We're talking about tens of thousands of times more capacity to create, more money, more value created. Abundance is going to be absolutely rampant. And there's no reason to be afraid, even though, like if you're a CRM company, your 20-year future cash flows from recurring maintenance revenue is suddenly gone. That's true, but the opportunity to pivot and thrive is bigger than ever. And so I think a lot of people are, there'll be a ton of volatility because people haven't mapped to the new reality yet, but opportunity is bigger, not smaller overall.

31:14Salim Ismail:But that agility is fundamental to large organizations' success. You know, I talked about in the last pod, the asteroid hitting the earth and changing the environment so rapidly and the slow numbering dinosaurs going extinct. That's exactly what we're talking about here. I mean, Salim, do you think that we can see large companies pivoting rapidly enough? Zero. Zero chance.

31:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:They will not be able to do it. I mean, look, we've seen this throughout history. It doesn't work. I think where you end up is, not to throw another metaphor at this, but you end up where we saw with Google Ads where you kind of took out the advertising market massively and then Google Ads becomes like a coral reef with lots of little species feeding off the reef. And if you're the reef, then you're in great shape. But in this case, the Reef itself is disappearing as we can decentralize completely to one-off computers running things. There are people using OpenClaw to go to small businesses, sitting down in front of them and automating workflows live for small businesses.

32:17Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:This is like incredible what's going on.

32:19Dave Blundin:You know what else, Salim? There are a lot of private equity funds that are coming at us now saying, hey, you know, big companies never change quickly. wait, this big company could be a small company very quickly because we don't need all these people. Now we have a small company with huge, huge cash flow. Wow. So there will be a PE fund

32:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:emerging shortly, or if it's not there already, that is going to buy up kind of medium-sized big companies and set up a digital twin infrastructure on the side where you have an AI native digital twin and you just move workflows over to it and you'll collapse the cost of running that organization by about three to five X. Well, that's what macro hard is about.

32:59Peter Diamandis:Mac already exists. I've started multiple companies like that. I've even tried to popularize a term for it. I call it an AIBO, an AI buyout. We've seen multiple PE firms doing that. Like this is table stakes at this point.

33:11Salim Ismail:Yeah. And of course, macro hards, you know, vision is I'm going to come in and digitize your entire employee base and operate it.

33:19Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:That's for, that's for pure software plays. But I think we're going to start to see this in, real potatoes. In the physical world.

33:27Peter Diamandis:Like Project Prometheus from Jeff Bezos is attempting to do this for industrial firms. Right. Yeah. Anyway, I think the point here is large companies

33:39Salim Ismail:need to take action right away. So Salim, what's your advice for a large company, a CEO listening and seeing this coming their way? What do they do?

33:49Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Exactly what Alex just said. You set up an AI-native digital twin on the edge. You run an immune system 10-week sprint to block the response from the mothership. You grow this thing and slowly move workflows over or as quickly as you can. You do a combination of bottom-up and top-down workflows. And the real shift in people's heads needs to be that instead of human-centric workflows, which is what it's been like for the last 150 years, we now move to agentic workflows where you can get things done much more effectively with hordes of little agents, two layers, strategic layer and an execution layer.

34:24Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And then human beings are doing oversight, exception handling, et cetera, because coordination costs go to near zero, execution costs go to near zero. And in and outside the firm, the future of the firm becomes a legal fiduciary liability purpose holder.

34:39Salim Ismail:And two other things real quick. The first is your brand. If it's reasonably good still, you own your brand and you own those customer relationships for the moment.

34:52Dave Blundin:I think it's worth also rereading Clay Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, which exactly addresses this. Salim, I know you're a big fan. We all should be. The Innovator's Dilemma contemplates, hey, every 10 years, something truly disruptive is going to obliterate whatever you do. And here's how you should react to it in that moment. But now instead of every 10 years, it's going to be every 10 months. And then soon it'll be every 10 weeks. And then it'll be every 10 days pretty soon too but the playbooks is still the same you know read the innovators dilemma invest in the new thing use your capital leverage in your installed base to invest in the new thing i just got a board

35:26Salim Ismail:call for one of my portfolio companies and you know my comment to my board and to all boards out there is you have got to give your ceo top cover to be dramatic in their modification of the business because, you know, and you have, I know.

35:48Peter Diamandis:Yeah, you're either the disruptor or you're disrupted. Yeah. Founder mode for everyone. You get founder mode and you get founder mode.

35:54Salim Ismail:Yes. I mean, that's basically it. If the company and the board and the CEO are not in founder mode and willing to do dramatic surgery on the company, you're dead. You're walking dead in any industry.

36:08Peter Diamandis:I'd also be remiss, Peter, if I didn't point out here we are basically on the eve of abundant knowledge work. Knowledge work, of course, being cooked. Knowledge work about to be post-scarce. And here we are bringing our hands over where to find scarcities in knowledge work as is about to become abundant. I just want to point out the irony.

36:30Salim Ismail:Such an extraordinary time to be alive. All right. Talking about disruption, disruption coming out of China, Alibaba's 35 billion parameter QEN 3.5, medium outpaces 235 billion QEN 3 in benchmarks, the power of small open weight models. So, Alex, to you, buddy.

36:54Peter Diamandis:This is happening in Western models, too. The difference is when, say, OpenAI launches a mini model or Google DeepMind launches a flash model, they don't advertise the parameter count, so it's not as viciously obvious as it is when a Chinese frontier lab launches an open-weight model. We get to see the benefits of distillation in a successor model, but it's striking. We're seeing almost 10x reductions in parameter count while maintaining capabilities or even increasing capabilities. And the broader picture, just to keep in mind is the capability density of models is increasing. This goes hand in hand with what we've talked about in the past, Sam Altman's comment about 40x year over year hyper deflation of costs at constant capability.

37:41Peter Diamandis:In this case, my mind immediately goes to what's the end game here? If we can see an increase in capabilities with a reduction from 235 billion parameters to 35 5 billion parameters. What does the end game look like? Where does this end? Does it end up -

37:58Salim Ismail:Elon made this point during our podcast with him. Now, if you remember that, Dave.

38:02Dave Blundin:Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. And yeah, he said he does, he asked his research team not to give him parameter count anymore, just give me bytes. Yeah. Because, you know, they keep quantizing and shrinking the file size. I had a lot to say about that, but I bit my tongue because that perspective isn't right either. But Alex predicted this a long time ago. I don't know how you saw this coming.

38:24Peter Diamandis:I just look at the scaling log curves and extrapolate.

38:27Dave Blundin:Well, it's... I mean, in this case... It's not funny. I was on the treadmill this morning watching old Moonshots podcasts, and I'm like, wow, that was like so long ago. And I look at the timestamp, and it was only like two months ago or three months ago. Like, holy crap. Things are changing so quickly. But Alex, you said this. I think you're the first person I ever heard from it saying, look, you know, the equivalent of a GPT-5 is going to be maybe 30, 40 billion parameters, but it could get as low as one or two billion truly. Because right now when they train that caliber of model, it has all this junk knowledge in it too.

39:02Dave Blundin:Not for thinking junk, you know, Twitter feeds and Kardashian news and all that other junk. Exactly. But strip that out, this could get very small and very tight and very fast.

39:11Peter Diamandis:It could get way smaller than a billion. I mean, I could imagine scenarios where it's only a few million parameter equivalents that's sort of the core microkernel of AGI or superintelligence, and the rest lives in a flat text database or something.

39:23Dave Blundin:Well, that will, you know, another thing Elon said is we're not as smart as we think we are. If you get superhuman intelligence down to a couple million parameters, you're going to be like, wow, we're really not that smart.

39:34Salim Ismail:The first person I heard speak about this was actually Imad Moustak speaking about what you can get onto your phone. And we'll see that in a moment. I mean, so my question is, is this bad news for the big compute incumbents, right? If massive data centers are being invested right now.

39:54Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:This is so good for the startup community. It's fantastic. We still need the big models.

39:58Dave Blundin:Well, it comes down to something Alex also talks about a lot, which is, do we have boundless problems we can solve? Like if you get everything to be 100 times faster this year, you can just do that much more. Do we actually run out of things to do? You know, is physics infinite or is physics finite? Is, you know, is human benefit infinite or is it finite? And we'll find out, I guess, in a year. But my guess is no. Every time you shrink the model and make it faster, you're still going to use every single chip in that data center just for the next thing. Especially when you start getting to the full cell simulator and all the health stuff that everyone's really eager to do.

40:35Dave Blundin:I mean, that is very, very compute intensive. I want to show you.

40:40Peter Diamandis:Peter, I thought 64 kilobytes should be enough for anyone.

40:44Salim Ismail:Exactly. Exactly. Oh, the good old days. Check out this. So I saw this on X this morning. So this is Quinn 3.5 running on an iPhone 17 Pro on airplane mode. And this is extraordinary. So it's a 2 billion parameter 6-bit model running on Apple Silicon. So imagine you're any place on the planet, you don't have Wi-Fi, but you've got Quen on your device, and it's got all the intelligence you need. I find this...

41:24Peter Diamandis:Seeing demos like this, in my mind, underline, either depending on whether you want to see it as competence or otherwise, how much of an opportunity Apple has to finally take the lead with local models, or conversely, how far behind they are in terms of taking the lead in terms of local models. But either way, clearly there's this enormous overhang. We could be running enormously competent reasoning models locally on all of our recent iPhones. The fact that it's not yet baked into the operating system, obviously, is very publicly embarrassing, maybe one wants to call it, for Apple. On the other hand, lots of rumors that this time around, finally, with Gemini integration, they're on the critical path and they'll finally launch something.

42:09Salim Ismail:Finally, Siri will not suck anymore. Apple intelligence, however they brand it.

42:13Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Note that the local ability, able to go offline, means it's unstoppable, it's uncensorable. I mean, this is incredible.

42:20Dave Blundin:Yeah. Well, that's the ultimate barrier, too. because if this can get to the level this year where it can do a gain-of-function virus, it can do a chemical weapon, and it all fits into a tiny, tiny little package. With nuclear proliferation back in the 1950s, there was a theory that, hey, if these physicists keep chugging along, they're going to make something the size of a grenade that has the power of an H-bomb. And then thankfully that didn't happen. It's just the physics didn't allow it. But the AI is not going to stop like that. Yeah, it's going to keep getting faster and denser and more compact.

42:54Dave Blundin:And the window of opportunity to put rules and regulations around this is very, very narrow now. It's really got to be this calendar year.

43:00Salim Ismail:What do you think is going on at the White House, in Congress, in the Department of War?

43:07Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So we've seen this conversation before, right? We had the head of one of the big agencies, the head of innovation of one of the big agencies at Singularity, Peter. You probably remember this. I do. We asked him, how do you think about this when somebody could design a virus on an iPhone, something, something, et cetera. And he said, look, and it was a much more clever answer than I thought he would give, which was when you have nuclear weapons, you know how many there are, you know where they are. You put eyes on it. You try and track it as much as possible. Great. When you've got something that's this democratized, what they're actively doing is opening up these communities.

43:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So they went to the biohacking communities and funded them to open up. Because if you're trying to do something dodgy, you kind of need to collaborate with a few people. And the conversations surface very quickly. And then the community does self-policing, self-reporting. somebody's doing something dodgy, asking a few people to point it out, et cetera, et cetera, because it's in their best interest. And it's actually worked very, very well so far. What happens when you get to this level is unclear, but I think the general trend has been very positive so far.

44:05Dave Blundin:I'll tell you one other thing. The way this evolved with financial services being self-regulated is we think of it right now as, oh, the federal government is incompetent. They're not doing anything. The researchers over at Anthropic are brilliant. they're moving a million miles an hour, it's going to end up being the same people. And this is the way it worked out with the SEC. You know, when you go, who works at the SEC? Oh, it's the same guy that was at Goldman Sachs yesterday doing his two years at the SEC or her two years at the SEC and then going back to Goldman Sachs. That's the way it's going to be with AI, too.

44:33Dave Blundin:Right now, nothing is happening at the White House. David Sachs is there, though. You've got one brilliant guy. What's going to happen next is anthropic people and open AI people are going to actually be the people working in the self-regulating agency. And so the people will have to bounce back and forth. And they'll do it because they're worried. They're conscious of the impact of not doing it.

44:58Salim Ismail:Yeah, still concerning, right? Still concerning to have this level of capability offline.

45:05Peter Diamandis:We know how to handle decentralized capabilities already. We have printers. In some cases, states are trying to regulate 3D printers. and before 3D printers, we had 2D printers that could be used for counterfeiting.

45:19Salim Ismail:But Alex, we baked software into all of those printers, right? There was a standard that was created for - There were the yellow dots. For Canon, for HP, for any printer that detected you trying to photocopy money, it wouldn't allow that. So the question is, if we're talking about open-weight models out of China that we don't control the software on, how do you bake in protection there?

45:51Peter Diamandis:There are so many different ways that one can defensively co-scale against 2 billion parameter 6-bit models running on someone's iPhone. We've already talked about some of them. There are other ways in the scheme of things. I don't think sort of these edge devices running tiny Chinese open-weight models either individually or collectively pose an enormous hazard to the market. They're just not that capable relative to the other models that are out there.

46:20Dave Blundin:I think the frustration is that the solutions are relatively obvious to Alex. We've had this at this meeting at the Statehouse before. It's like, guys, it's not that hard. Here's what we need to do. And then nothing happens. That's the frustration. But yeah, registering the models, registering the compute, tracking the GPUs and where they are, it's all very doable. The ideas are not super complicated.

46:42Peter Diamandis:And defensive co-scaling of making sure that the most flops are going to good purposes rather than bad purposes. I'm reminded, I think it was the New Yorker cartoon. Guy is up late at night at his computer saying, I can't come to bed. Someone somewhere said something wrong on the internet. We can't get so bothered by the fact that someone somewhere might be doing something wrong with a$2 billion parameter model on it.

47:08Dave Blundin:I've got so many agents running now, and I put in place a little rule that said, hey, before any process launches, write a mission statement and store it next to your code. Really? It solves so many problems. I can go back and read the mission statement and say, hey, what the hell are you working on anyway? Well, read my mission statement. Like, wow, that makes no sense, or that makes tons of sense. It's so simple. because the AI is the first self-documenting, self-improving, self-cleaning thing in the world. Employee, right. Yeah, yeah. Just a couple simple little things like that will solve all these problems.

47:36Dave Blundin:Have you told your employees to do the same? Actually, yes. It's a little bit different. It's, look, whatever you're doing, make sure that it's in a written document that the AI can see too. I don't want any opaque activity because the AI can't see it, then I don't want to see it. I want everything to be on the same page with us and the AIs. Celine, want to close this out here? Salim?

48:00Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:You know, I think a key point that we have to remember is the ratio of good to bad. We worry about the downside and we should worry about the downside. And the amplitude of the negative is getting bigger and bigger as people can run these models. But I always go back to the eBay Craigslist example, where when you could first do eBay or Craigslist at scale, you could see human nature at scale. And so anthropologists and sociologists studied the transactions at eBay and Craigslist. You can master email address pretty well. On eBay, I can throw up a picture of a MacBook, grab your$1 ,000, and I'm off to Fiji.

48:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So what's the actual ratio? What is the real true nature of humanity? And by studying these systems at scale, Kijiji in Canada, Mercado, Libre in Argentina, Craigslist, eBay, they found that the ratio is consistently 8 ,000 to 1, Meaning there's 8 ,000 positive transactions on eBay for each fraudulent transaction. That should give you incredible optimism for the future of humanity.

49:01Salim Ismail:Yeah, agreed. All right, let's move us along here. Let's head to the Googleverse. Google releases Nano Banana 2. So this is running on Gemini 3.1 Flash. It's 4K resolution. It's at 0.045 cents per image. that's a price point that's cheaper than stock images. Four cents an image. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's 4.5 cents per image. Excuse me. It's cheaper than buying stock images. And so is this the end of commercial photography, illustrators, stock image platforms? Probably.

49:43Peter Diamandis:We're just getting started here. And I think maybe buried underneath the headline, but in the release documentation, is this is the first image model from Google that combines a reasoning model, which I think they used slightly flowery language for, but basically the reasoning power of Nano Banana Pro with the instantaneity, I think they might have just said, with the speed of Gemini Flash model. So under the covers, I think this is technically really interesting. It's combining probably some sort of diffusion model that we get with reasoning capabilities. And I think achieving the cost reductions of a diffusion model with nonetheless the capabilities of reasoning, we're going to see this spread from images, where it's mostly right now in video, back to text, back to code.

50:34Peter Diamandis:There are a few other labs, smaller labs, that have started to make pretty loud announcements about how they're achieving purported 5x, 10x cost reductions or speed increases using diffusion models instead of autoregressive transformers. But I think this is probably the tip of the iceberg for some final consolidation of autoregressive transformers, which are used for cogen and natural language for the most part on the one hand, and then diffusion models and diffusion transformers on the other hand that are used for images and audio and video. We're just going to finally get one consolidated architecture at the end of the day that does everything.

51:14Peter Diamandis:Yeah.

51:15Salim Ismail:I mean, this is the wake-up call for people to remember that whatever you're seeing, you cannot necessarily believe it. Every pixel is going to be AI-generated at the end of the day. Salim, thoughts?

51:31Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I mean, the cost drop is incredible. People are just going to do so much more with it. Demarketization of creativity, great. Love it. Absolutely amazing.

51:39Dave Blundin:I'm kind of curious, I don't know if you guys know, but the curve on intelligence is just ridiculous. But on diffusion models, I don't really know. I know they've gotten a lot faster and cheaper in the last few months, but it doesn't feel like the same type of algorithm. Like, it may hit a wall. I don't know. Do you guys know?

51:56Peter Diamandis:OpenAI has been investing, this is in the published literature, investing a lot of effort and probably deep mind as well, maybe slightly less prominently, in trying to avoid the need for many iterations on a diffusion model. So a diffusion model normally, conventionally, takes many iterations to start from pure noise and refine the pure noise into the final image or the final video. There was a lot of interest that was publicly available, call it six to 12 months ago, from OpenAI and some other folks as well to see if they could just one shot or two shot straight from pure noise to the final image.

52:36Peter Diamandis:I do think, to your point, Dave, I think, although I haven't seen maybe in the past two to three months, any scaling laws for diffusion models, prior to that, I saw a ton of work on scaling laws for diffusion models. And diffusion models have scaling laws, too. Everything has scaling laws.

52:53Dave Blundin:Yeah. You know, Ahmad would know all about this, too. Let's pick his brain next week in L.A.

52:57Salim Ismail:Absolutely.

52:57Dave Blundin:He's the king of diffusion.

52:59Salim Ismail:The new standard is, you know, go to Nano Banana 2 and ask it to generate imagery. so imagery becomes free effectively. And it used to be my current workflow, my previous workflow was I'd go to Google Images and hope I found something. Now everything is created from scratch and it's perfect. I love this image in this slide here of Elon with Sam and Dario and the whole leadership team of all the hyperscalers. Alex, you should be in there, man.

53:34Dave Blundin:You got to raise your game here. One more minute.

53:36Peter Diamandis:We're running out of scarcities, but maybe appearing in that image is one of the scarcities our civilization has left.

53:42Salim Ismail:We can make that happen for you, for sure. All right, continuing on with our friends at Google, Gemini can now automate some multi-step tasks on Android devices. So Gemini is now an on-device agent that can navigate real apps and complete real transactions. You know, handle DoorDash, McDonald's, Starbucks for you. So interesting, significant, what do you guys think?

54:10Dave Blundin:I think it's usually significant. Expect it. Well, look, there's been a long time since there was a feature function on the phone that threatened Apple in any way, but AI is it. And if you try to use Siri to do something constructive while you're driving, it's just so painfully impossible. Also, when you start an AI dialogue and you're in the middle of the conversation, the thought process, you don't want it to go away. It's addictive and productive. And if it follows you on your phone and seamlessly, it's just incredibly empowering. So if Google wins that race with Android, they might actually chip away at the iPhone profit dominance for the first time.

54:50Dave Blundin:Now, keep in mind that they also need the duopoly for antitrust reasons. So neither company can afford to completely annihilate the other one. They need some parity in the balance on the force.

55:01Salim Ismail:I don't know if you saw the data. I mean, we've seen a significant drop-off in mobile phones, right, in terms of mobile phone purchases. And that will be displaced, of course, by headwear and ear wear and all kinds of devices that are beyond just your phone. I think a lot of that is because...

55:19Dave Blundin:Sorry, the reason the phone sales dropped off is because they didn't have a function or a feature that everyone was clamoring for. Because people used to get a new phone when the cameras were improving like crazy. They'd get a new phone every 18 months to two years. Now it's like, well, I can sit on this phone for three years, four years. I'm not even noticing the difference. But again, AI could completely change that, the neural chips. Sorry, Alex, go ahead.

55:39Peter Diamandis:I think there's also a supply-side element where the rising cost of memory is making phones, in some cases, more expensive. And we're seeing, I think, a generational transition from smartphones absorbing the silicon and absorbing TSMC's output over to AI data centers as the new form factor for computers away from this. But just narrowly on Gemini for multi-step tasking on Android, this is what Siri was originally supposed to be about. And before Siri, this is what the DARPA personal assistant that learns, or PAL, was supposed to deliver. We've known how to do this in some abstract sense for a decade plus.

56:18Peter Diamandis:What was missing? Why, you ask, are we only getting this now? I always like to ask, why do things take so long? Why can't they be faster? In this case, I really think it was about a combination of reasoning models and vision language models that could fit compactly onto a personal device. And we're getting that now, finally. And it's going to be everywhere. but we really should have had this functionality even without the ability to read the screen and understand arbitrary applications. We should have had this 10 years ago and that's borderline inexcusable.

56:48Salim Ismail:I think what's most significant here is the fact that Google has a huge installed base of phones, of Android phones and the ability to take their AI systems and that installed base. OpenAI doesn't have that. Anthropic doesn't have that and it's going to be a massive differentiator for Google.

57:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Apple has it.

57:09Salim Ismail:Apple could have had it. Apple could have had it.

57:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I'm a longtime Android user, so I'm super excited by this. Yeah, you turn all my iMessages green.

57:17Salim Ismail:It pisses me off.

57:18Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Apologies for ruining your visual field sphere, Peter. But this is like agency at the operating system level, which I think is amazing. And it also means that commerce APIs are becoming machine to machine first and human second. So you'll have less friction in consumer flows. this is going to reshape marketplaces over time. So it's really exciting.

57:39Salim Ismail:All right. Next article is a real fun one. Amazon makes a contingent offer to put$35 billion into open AI based upon them, first off, going public and secondly, achieving AGI. Enter Salim with his normal rant. What the hell is AGI?

57:57Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I mean, you know, it's kind of incredible that we've financialized superintelligence, which is amazing. Having AGI as a financial milestone is unbelievable, given we have no idea. I mean, it's great that intelligence has become a balance sheet trigger. That's incredible. But this is so weird. And thank goodness it says or.

58:19Dave Blundin:Well, Alex, doesn't the agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft requires OpenAI to give the source code and all of the intellectual property to Microsoft until AGI? Do you think they use the same definition of AGI?

58:31Peter Diamandis:I suspect it's something similar. So the definition, my understanding, based on public reporting, of the OpenAI to Microsoft definition of AGI went through several iterations with the most recent iteration prior to their, I think, for-profit transition being, and Salim, maybe you'll like this, it did actually have a definition. It was something like generating$100 billion in either earnings or revenue, I forget. So maybe we need to coin like AGI as a unit of currency, like an AGI is$100 billion of earnings or something.

59:05Salim Ismail:We're measuring compute in terms of gigawatts and AGI in terms of dollars. I love it. That's right.

59:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Listen, that's fine. That's just all they've done is substitute an earnings plateau for that, which is fine. So this is interesting, right?

59:20Salim Ismail:This is$50 billion. It dwarfs Microsoft's$13 billion investment. And again, I'm going back to what is Amazon doing here?

59:30Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I would like to make the point which we've made earlier, which is that a lot of this is Amazon credits.

59:36Dave Blundin:Which is fine, because that's how they would have spent it anyway.

59:40Peter Diamandis:There are lots of tendrils going both directions from Amazon to OpenAI and back based on public details of the announcement, like the requirement that OpenAI will use Amazon's Tranium or Tranium 2 chips for training. It's good for Amazon. Amazon has a long and storied history of purchasing their own customers in some sense. Well, in some cases, literally acquiring them, but in many cases, paying for the information and the learnings that come from having a customer that's using Amazon as the world's most customer-centric company. And in this case, Amazon missed, arguably, missed the frontier AI boat.

1:00:24Peter Diamandis:And so paying to get themselves, to deal themselves back into the game is, I think, par for the course. Their up to$50 billion of investment is at far worse terms than, say, Microsoft's original billions when Microsoft was much earlier in the game. And I think this is just the price of reestablishing themselves at the infra level of the party. And it's also been reported that as part of this deal, Amazon will get customized versions of OpenAI's models internally. Amazon will get to post as the exclusive third-party cloud host OpenAI's frontier suite of automated AI co-worker employees. So Amazon will get a lot out of this too.

1:01:10Salim Ismail:I mean, this is so incestuous, you know, what's going on right now. I mean, Amazon was all anthropic for a while. Now they're open AI.

1:01:21Peter Diamandis:You say incestuous, but... Go ahead, Dave, sorry.

1:01:25Dave Blundin:Well, the U.S. public market, all companies combined, is about 50 trillion. The AI companies are 20 trillion of the 50 trillion now. So, you know, it's incestuous, but it's like, If that$20 trillion becomes$30,$40 trillion, which it inevitably will, it's the majority of the market is just seven companies. So when they do a lot of deals with each other, it's like, well, is that incest? That's where the money is. It's the whole freaking economy is those handful of people.

1:01:51Peter Diamandis:I also think maybe, I would say incestuous, not perhaps the word I'd use for this, maybe circular is what we're gesturing at. But even that, that's not my take at all. In this case, I see competition. And I also see horizontal stratification, that if Amazon is striking deals with Anthropic, but also with OpenAI, and OpenAI is moving some of its workload from Microsoft Cloud to Amazon and also to Google TPU Clouds, that to me looks like, A, the market for infrastructure for the frontier labs is very competitive. That's great for the economy. And B, it's starting to horizontally stratify. So if OpenAI is feeling impulses not just to vertically integrate down to the data center layer itself, but is so compute-starved that it needs to, following the law of comparative advantage, needs to outsource some of its compute to Amazon with its trinium architecture and Google with its TPUs, that's a sign, if anything, that there's such insatiable demand for compute that it's raining on everyone, even with perhaps less loved compute architectures.

1:02:58But there's an interesting thing in negation here, which is XAI is missing in all these conversations, right?

1:03:07Salim Ismail:So Elon is going 100 % alone. Elon loves vertical integration. And he doesn't play well with others. He loves—

1:03:16Dave Blundin:Yeah, and it's interesting that the big, big money we saw with Anthropic is in the corporate use case, corporate white-collar use case. People trust two clouds. They trust the—well, three, I guess, if you count Oracle. They trust the AWS cloud in a big way, and they trust the Microsoft cloud, Azure. And I guess they sort of trust Oracle. Not Google Cloud? No, Google Cloud, a bunch of our companies have been kind of bribed by Google to use Google Cloud. As Alex was saying, they'll pay you to switch, and some have taken it. But for the most part, Google spies on everything. Their terms of service never say they won't do anything.

1:03:55Dave Blundin:If you read any terms of service from Google on any product, it says we may do this, we may do that, we may do the other, which kind of implies they won't do other things. But if you read the legal, they literally don't restrict themselves in any way whatsoever from doing anything.

1:04:07Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It's honest.

1:04:09Dave Blundin:It's very corporate unfriendly.

1:04:11Salim Ismail:Honest, you're right.

1:04:12Dave Blundin:Yeah, yeah. But, you know, Microsoft legitimately says, no, we will not steal your data. No, we will not steal your intellectual property. No, we will not read your email if you use Outlook. and AWS is even more, you know, so people trust those clouds and then they want their AI model to be inside that trusted container inside the cloud. So, so far it's just been clawed on AWS. You know, everyone's running away with clawed on AWS. So all of a sudden, for reasons, you know, I don't know, maybe just variety, maybe not having Microsoft and OpenAI be just, you know, bedfellows by themselves, Amazon's going way out of, you know, massive$50 billion move here to get two options on the AWS.

1:04:56Salim Ismail:Do we know what the valuation of this round is?

1:05:00Peter Diamandis:I think the reported valuation of OpenAI's overall round was$730 billion pre.

1:05:06Salim Ismail:Yeah. Right. And so, you know, this is not going to be a big risk. I mean, when OpenAI goes public, it's likely to go public, you know, north of a trillion dollars. So, you'll get a quick pop and it's probably, you know, what do we, you know, we have three big IPOs coming up. SpaceX is, you know, anticipated maybe as early as next month, I heard. That's right. and then we'll have Anthropic and then we'll have OpenAI. So, I mean, if you can get a 50 % pop in your price shares in six months, that's incredible investment. That's not investment advice

1:05:40Peter Diamandis:for anyone who's going to misconstrue that.

1:05:42Salim Ismail:Well, hey, listen, I will give investment advice for people to get 50 % in six months. I mean, why not? Just not investment advice from me, it's from Peter. Okay. Listen, if anybody can get a 50 % return in six months in any deal, that's pretty damn good.

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1:07:05Salim Ismail:Another fun article this week is coming from Pulsia AI created by Ben Serra that runs companies autonomously. So they're currently running over a thousand companies. So imagine being able to take your company, putting it on Pulsia AI and say, go. So Dave, would you do this with any of your companies?

1:07:23Dave Blundin:Yeah, this is inevitable. I don't know if I'd use this exact product or not. I haven't checked it out yet, but a hundred percent, the philosophy is clearly where things are going. And, you know, look at the end of the day, what does an executive team do? You know, other than a couple of hugely important key strategic directions. Everything else is just performance reviews, paperwork, whatever. All that can be very, very AI'd now.

1:07:47Salim Ismail:And the elephant in the room here is, okay, I turn it over to Pulsia AI, but who's legally responsible if your company has a breach of contract or fraud or harms a customer? Is it Pulsia? Is it you?

1:08:05Peter Diamandis:That's why I think where this ends is, we get this question, I think, in the AMAs and otherwise all the time, like, what's left for humans? Should everyone become an entrepreneur? Well, let the chorus of YouTube commenters say, well, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. I would say where this ends up, not in the distant future, like 10 years from now, but in the medium term, like five years from now, is single person conglomerates, where single person can oversee lots of agents that are all building businesses. This isn't for everyone, obviously, but as we start to get toward one person or a zero person unicorn becoming more and more popular, again, I've argued in the past we're likely already there in some sense.

1:08:50Peter Diamandis:But as we start to see that long tail of the number of people per company over some valuation start to stretch out, I think this model, call it a broader model of a one-person conglomerate, where you have a person sitting on top of basically an entire PE firm's worth of agents, starts to make an enormous amount of sense. So I've been poking at Pulsia or Pulsia, and it's like a lot of micro businesses, and some of them look like they're varying levels of seriousness. But I checked, and you can actually, with some of its micro businesses, you can actually go and purchase stuff. So you can already engage in real commerce, spend real money via Stripe with some of the businesses that are running on its platform.

1:09:38Peter Diamandis:And I think we're going to see so much more of this in the future. I'm super bullish.

1:09:41Salim Ismail:They're micro companies. They're not real businesses in terms of, you know, significance of revenue, probably, or complexity. But it's the beginning.

1:09:50Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I put OpenEXO on there. You did? I did to see, okay, could we, you know, I literally talked half an hour ago, but, you know, can you create a shadow AI digital twin on the edge? And this is essentially it. I think Dave's point is valid. It may not be this one, but definitely these are going to be agentic hosting systems where you log a brand. You pick a service, it'll email and find customers for you. It'll run the execution for you. What we're seeing here is Kosa's theory collapsing in real time, right? Because if you have a thousand companies in a few days of their AI run, this is the marginal cost of launching.

1:10:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:A company goes to zero now. It's 50 bucks a month to run an organization, run a company on this. So this is becoming really surreal. And we're going to expect to see thousands of examples in the statations of like this.

1:10:37Salim Ismail:If it works, it will blow up to millions.

1:10:40Dave Blundin:Yeah. And also, these things always come up from the bottom. It's like up and from. Yeah, like a Jamie Dimon or some senior exec will look at it and say, it looks like a toy to me. Forget it. We're not doing this. And then it sneaks up on them and they get crushed. And they're like, what happened? But some guy was using it to manage a vending machine or manage a social media site. And it seems so trivial, but it comes up quickly. And it sneaks up from the bottom. That's the way the Mac was, right? The Mac was just perceived as a toy for college students. It's never good for the enterprise, but then it grows up and grows into the enterprise.

1:11:13Dave Blundin:But this will happen much more quickly.

1:11:15Peter Diamandis:I would also argue we've seen this happen before in finance with quantitative trading algos, which went from none of the volume in public securities markets to 70, 80, 90 plus percent of the daily volume. And you know what? People survive. We still have human traders manually fat fingering trades into the public securities markets. but by volume, they're completely dominated by algorithmic traders. I think we're going to see the same thing happening in the rest of the world outside finance, in the physical world, in various e-commerce spaces, where over time, most of the volume will eventually be dominated by algorithms.

1:11:54All right.

1:11:55Salim Ismail:Watch this news item, guys. It will be interesting. And of course, Pulsia AI is one, probably, of many that will be materializing. I thought this was a pretty fascinating conversation. Our article on Burger King launches AI voice assistant called Patty in employee headsets. Let's watch a video.

1:12:18Dave Blundin:Hi there.

1:12:18Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Good morning, Patty.

1:12:20Dave Blundin:Looks like we had a great breakfast shift today. Is there anything that needs my immediate attention? The team's friendliness scores this morning were the highest this week.

1:12:30Salim Ismail:We are running low on Diet Coke and the Freestyle Machine. Thank you, Patty.

1:12:35Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Hi, Patty. We just sold our last cinnamon apple pie.

1:12:38Salim Ismail:Thanks for letting me know. Would you like me to remove them from our menu until tomorrow's shipment arrives?

1:12:44Dave Blundin:Yes, please.

1:12:45Salim Ismail:Okay. Apple pies have been removed from our menu boards, third-party delivery, kiosks, and BK app. I will add them back as soon as tomorrow's shipment arrives. Thank you, Patty.

1:12:57Peter Diamandis:Meat puppets. Meat puppets. You have two things. One, admire the punny name Patty for a burger chain. So clever. Two, going back to my comments from a few pods ago that we're going to be living in every single sci-fi scenario at once. This was a sci-fi scenario, I would argue, called Manna. Manna was a novel written by Marshall Brain about 20-plus years ago at this point where you had human employees who were on headsets all taking directions from a centralized AI in businesses. We're there. We've arrived in Nana, and it starts with fast food. The only thing that video didn't capture is how encouraging and enthusiastic the AI is.

1:13:41Dave Blundin:Whether you're using it to code, whether you're using it to walk around and pick things out of the fryer later, it's just so engaging and energizing. And that's the part that people are surprised. Because it seems like, hey, the AI asking me or telling me what to do is dystopian. And yeah, maybe, but it's really much more empowering and engaging and fun than walking around by yourself.

1:14:05Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:This reminds me of the Baxter robot where you would move its arms and show it what to do. And it showed a very friendly fellow who was smiling at you as he coached the robot. But he was literally teaching it to take his own job. For me, the coaching tool is a transition to automation pressure. Frontline services obviously become AI-mediated performance management. So the end point here is going to be very interesting.

1:14:33Salim Ismail:So this is AI surveillance as well, right? So this is the AI watching every employee. This is beyond just saying please and thank you. It's rating them on their efficiency. And calling it a coaching tool, Salim, is sort of like a corporate euphemism.

1:14:51Peter Diamandis:Exactly. It's Warwellian. One has to admire the Orwellian nature of the naming. We do.

1:14:57Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I'm waiting for it to say, so you dropped the fries for the third time this morning?

1:15:03Peter Diamandis:Let's see how it deals with that. This is literally, Peter, it's literally meat puppets. Oh, my God.

1:15:09Salim Ismail:So funny. But so, you know, we probably see this entering everywhere, right? When you're recording a customer service call right now, you're effectively doing that without the feedback in the moment. But as a CEO, if you want to understand who the weak players are in your company, or you want to try and provide on-the-job continuous coaching and see who can respond, this is highly efficient but highly dicey.

1:15:45Peter Diamandis:Yeah, that's right. You're saying, Peter, it's not just knowledge work that's cooked. Cooking is cooked.

1:15:51Salim Ismail:I think you're going to see unions rebel against this. Big time, big time.

1:15:58Dave Blundin:Yeah, and I don't know if there's any winning that war. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the AI co-pilot is gathering a huge amount of data, and a lot of that data will go into the decision on what can be automated and what can't be automated. And over time, everything can be automated.

1:16:11Salim Ismail:This is like the Amazon delivery worker who is wearing a pair of AR glasses. and Amazon is saying, oh, this is, you know, to help you show where to put the package and warn you about there's a dog. No, no, no. Those AR glasses are training Amazon's model to replace you with a robot, to be very clear. Yeah, yeah.

1:16:32Dave Blundin:But, you know, if you rebel against it, what's that gonna achieve? So you just gotta get on the wave, man. There's no choice. You just have to be a user. You have to get on either CloudBot or one of these other platforms and it's coming. And yeah, you can go pick it in front of OpenAI's office like all those people, but it's not gonna work out for you, I'm telling you. Like, it's well-motivated. I don't blame you for doing it, but it's not gonna work.

1:17:00Salim Ismail:We're gonna see all of these fast food chains begin to bring in robots very shortly. I think this sort of version of Patty, you know, we're gonna get, you know, the unions rebelling against it, but I think you'll end up making it voluntary. And if you really want to improve your abilities, you'll volunteer to use Patti. Anyway, interesting story.

1:17:23Dave Blundin:If you think about the warehouse worker or the Freilater operator, if you get one in a thousand to volunteer, that's all the training data you need. That's why it's fruitless to try and fight it because the numbers just don't line up.

1:17:35Peter Diamandis:Also, I think the transition can happen really quickly relative to political swings. You don't need that much training data to automate away many of these tasks with humanoid robots and VLA's so close to being production ready for certain applications. I don't think the transition period with Paddy's, or again, call out to MANA by Marshall Brain, which foresaw all of this 20 plus years ago, I don't think the transition period is going to be long enough to even necessarily give political counter swings enough traction to make it worth it. One year? Two years? The transition's already happening.

1:18:12Peter Diamandis:But to VLA robots, I think, yeah, next two to three years. Yeah.

1:18:18Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I've got just a quick thought here. Before this really has time to penetrate, you're going to have drone deliveries of food like this. And it'll obviate a lot of this. Yeah.

1:18:30Salim Ismail:I've got at the Abundance Summit this year, I've got an incredible company, Zipline, coming to talk about what they've done. I love the company, love their ability to transform delivery services in the United States. This is, of course, the company that began in Rwanda by delivering blood supplies and are now operating with Walmart and delivering every 30 seconds. And their prediction in the next two, three years will be a delivery per second. Extraordinary progress. All right, another delivery company. This is Uber. So check this out. Uber employees have built an AI clone of Dara, the CEO. to practice their pitches.

1:19:11Salim Ismail:So before you go pitch Dara your idea, you should pitch it to his AI clone. I'm curious, Salim, what do you think?

1:19:22Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Oh, well, this is great at one level because you get executive like cognition as a service. It really allows scalable leadership. We're actually doing this at OpenEXO where we've created a clone of me with loaded up with all the EXO thinking and we're rolling it out to all the community members so they can ask me a question as they're advising clients or companies or cities, whatever, and I don't have to be in the middle of that. So I think this is hugely relevant and I think it makes absolute sense.

1:19:52Peter Diamandis:Yeah. At some point, someone's going to ask, can the AI clone of Dara actually function as CEO and not just for pitch practice? Exactly. It's the transition.

1:20:03Dave Blundin:It's highly, highly likely that the avatar of Dara, of Peter, of Alex, of Salim, will persist for a long, long time with the same voice and the same face. And it's kind of, in a sense, locked in. If you win the race to being the avatar, people get used to it. But they like the fact that there's a human being behind it. I was telling Alex before the podcast started that I just love his Spotify version of the daily, you know, this day in the singularity. And YouTube as well.

1:20:30Peter Diamandis:It's the same voice on YouTube, Spotify, and voiceover for Substack if folks want to listen to an AI version of myself on in the innermost loop newsletter.

1:20:37Dave Blundin:Yeah, and I really don't care that it's AI generated. I know it's Alex who wrote the content under the covers and it just feels great. But without the human being behind it, if it was some synthetic, never existed person, I wouldn't like that as much.

1:20:51Salim Ismail:Do you remember the movie, Real Genius? One of my favorite movies. Of course. Yeah, I love that movie. There's a scene in which it's typically taking place at Caltech and where the professor's in the front and slowly the students are, instead of attending class, they're putting their tape recorder down. And the professor finally, instead of teaching a class, plays a tape to all the tape recorders recording it. So I sort of imagine this is what we're going to see here with these AI clones of Dara. It's going to be, Dara at some point is going to just take a vacation and let his AI clone run the company and see how it does.

1:21:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We'll have to ask him this question on stage, Peter.

1:21:32Salim Ismail:Yeah, no, it's great. And just as a reminder to everybody, Dara is going to be on stage. Salim and I are going to be interviewing him at the Abundant Summit. And this year, for the first time, we're doing a live stream at the Abundant Summit. We're going to be live streaming Eric Schmidt, where Dave and I are going to be doing the interview with Eric Schmidt and with Dara. We're going to be doing a live Moonshots podcast with AWG, Dave, Salim, myself. So if you're interested in actually listening to the live stream of the summit next week, or depending when this goes out this week, we're going to drop the link below.

1:22:12Salim Ismail:It's free. We want to get this out as far and wide as we can. So enjoy. The Abundance Summit is a high ticket price, and we have 600 amazing CEOs flying in from around the world. but this live stream is free so go to the link down below and check it out um and i hope you'll

1:22:32Dave Blundin:listen in okay ticket sales only 50k if you want to uh it is 50k but we've been sold out

1:22:40Salim Ismail:we are oversold sold out at 50k what the hell oversold yeah well it's it's an amazing event and so proud to have it is all three of you guys joining me this year all right one more event announcement. Again, super excited about this. I'm going to be joined by Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Kotler, Dave, and AWG on May the 4th. So if you want to join a very exclusive event, spend the day with Ray, Steve, Stephen Kotler, actually AWG, and Dave. If you buy 100 copies of my new book, We Are As Gods. This is the book that Stephen Kotler and I wrote as the follow-on to Abundance. You can join us. The URL is weareasgodsbook.com slash 100.

1:23:35Salim Ismail:weareasgodsbook.com slash 100. We'll put the link below. Dave, we're gonna be holding this at OneKendall. Hi, baby. At Link Studios. Super, super cool. Alex, excited to have you as well. on the Star Wars day. Is it a coincidence? Is this a Star Wars holiday? I'm a Star Trek guy, but may the fourth be with you is an important reminder of when we're holding this. So I'm excited to have Ray there for four or five hours. Go deep on all of these topics. And again, if you want to help move We Are As Gods to the top of the New York Times best set of list, you can do that. Just go to the link. You buy a hundred books.

1:24:18Salim Ismail:you'll be there. We'll give you signed copies and spend an enjoyable afternoon together going deep onto all topics exponential. All right, moving on. Let's go to energy and data centers. Wow, look at this. U.S. plans to add a record 86 gigawatts of utility scale capacity this coming year. Salim, thoughts?

1:24:44Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Well, this is the point we've been making for a while that the cost curve of solar is just dominating everything, plus the cost curve of battery. And once you have battery and storage available, you can unlock solar in a massive way. I'm going to point to two data points, track Ramesh Nam if you want to kind of go deep on this, because he tracks all this very carefully. But in 2016, it became cheaper if you're doing power generation to do solar than fossil fuels. And so almost all energy generation since then has been doing that. But in 2019, we had a more important inflection point. It became cheaper to do CAPEX, build and run a solar facility than just run.

1:25:26Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Just the OPEX of fossil fuels is more expensive than building and running solar. So basically from now on, all energy generation for the most part, except for specific legacy stuff, etc., or political stuff, is going to be renewables. And we see that taking over in India and China and now finally here. And I think this is really, really amazing because solar just keeps on giving. And it's just going to keep going that way. It's an unlimited resource. So to all of the – and by the way, people worry about coal, etc. I think the coal industry in the U.S. employs 60 ,000 people. The solar energy industry employs half a million people.

1:26:06Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So it's not about the jobs either. So get over it and let's just move on.

1:26:11Salim Ismail:Dave, you remember when Elon said he has a mission for Tesla to generate 100 gigawatts of solar per year?

1:26:18Dave Blundin:Yeah, yeah. Remember when Eric Schmidt said, it was only a year ago, said AI is going to require 100 gigawatts by 2029. It's a crisis. We'll never get there. And America is just incredible. When America gets mobilized, it's just the most amazing force in the world. And here we are. It's only a year later. And we're like, yeah, we're going to find our 100 gigawatts. There's no way we're going to stop doing AI for lack of power. We'll find a way.

1:26:44Peter Diamandis:Yeah, and also in an environment with diminished subsidies also, all of the hand-wringing from months ago, oh, the subsidies are going away, how awful it is. No, we're getting solar even in the absence of the same subsidies. Yeah, you don't need any of that.

1:26:58Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:anymore. The economics just take over.

1:27:00Salim Ismail:And it used to be driven by people's concerns about the environment. Now it's making money and deploying AI. Feed the super intelligence. Yeah. All right. This is a big story this week. Tech giants to self-fund their production of power. So this is a White House effort. We have Michael Kratios at the center here, a friend of the pod. We'll be doing a podcast with him in the next couple of months here, asking the hyperscalers to actually build or buy their own power. And, of course, this is in response to consumers' concern about rising rates of electricity. Gentlemen, thoughts?

1:27:47Dave Blundin:Well, I think Alex was one of the first to say, actually, that this is not going to be a problem because it's a very, very simple regulatory change that fixes the prices for the consumers. And the data center operators, they only spend 10 % of the total data center costs on power anyway, so they can find an alternate way without disrupting the consumer. If you let natural forces happen, of course they'll suck all the power away from every home because they can overpay by about 5x. But it's such a simple little fix. And here's the simple little fix. But we pointed that out a while ago. So, you know, but it's also a case study where, like, hey, the consumer is really, really worried about this little thing, like, you know, the cost of their power.

1:28:29Dave Blundin:Like, come on, man, there's so much disruption coming. But the politicians love to pick these little things and make a big deal out of it, you know, get a whole bunch of votes, you know, do a whole bunch of press releases, whatever. And that's my read on this.

1:28:42Salim Ismail:I love the fact that these frontier labs are buying fusion plants and nuclear plants and gas generators and generating their own power. They're becoming full stack, innermost loop all the way to orbital data centers.

1:28:54Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think what's really wonderful here is that in the past, you used to have to have government making these big infrastructure investments to push the world forward. And now we're at a point where private sector can push the world forward, whether it's data centers in space or energy infrastructure or fusion or whatever. And I think that's incredibly good for the world.

1:29:15Dave Blundin:And also keep in mind the AI data centers, the prior data centers serving up video and Netflix and everything, they need to be near the consumer for latency reasons. But the AI data centers can be in the middle of West Texas and Wyoming and whatever. Or Kazakhstan.

1:29:29Salim Ismail:It can be any place.

1:29:31Dave Blundin:Or space. Yeah, they can be any place. It really doesn't disrupt the consumer homes too much unless you deliberately camp right on top of them.

1:29:38Salim Ismail:Which is, the other point to make is, you know, all of these conversations around not in our backyard. well if it's not in your backyard you've missed the economic opportunity in your city or state

1:29:49Dave Blundin:because those data centers can go any place exactly what alex was trying to say to the state house here in massachusetts and just could not get through like you cannot be timid like everything's in texas now but but the moment it came and went you know it's well it's not over yet but i mean it's come on man you got to be much faster much more aggressive much more nimble but yeah yeah Yeah, like your whole population of your state is depending on you to get on this bandwagon. It's trillions and trillions of dollars.

1:30:18Peter Diamandis:I also think this points in the direction of enterprise use cases of superintelligence driving the cost, at least the marginal cost of energy, down towards zero for consumers. In the same sense that all these enterprise use cases of frontier models are effectively driving the cost of superintelligence for intelligence's sake, for reasoning's sake, for consumers down to zero. You don't pay many, many people don't pay for ChatGPT or Gemini. It's ad-supported at most, otherwise free. I think this points in the direction of eventually, so like right now, it's the frontier labs have to pay for their own electricity bill.

1:30:58Peter Diamandis:Tomorrow, two, three years from now, I think we move to a world where AI has driven such an overabundance of energy that the next deal, the next, next deal might be offering free electricity to communities within a certain radius of the data centers. And this is how we get to abundance.

1:31:17Salim Ismail:Exactly. And the demand for electricity is going to drive R &D and more breakthroughs mediated by AI. And, you know, we're just at the beginning of understanding physics.

1:31:30Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I've seen five startup plans in the last few weeks around how to drop energy costs in data centers and data center optimization, et cetera, et cetera. So it's absolutely happening.

1:31:41Salim Ismail:Yeah. Let's go to the next story related here, which is advances in energy systems. So here we see, first off, a 30 gigawatt hour battery coming from Excel Energy and Form Energy. and we're seeing our friends at Boom, which originally began to create a consumer supersonic airplane generating 1.21 gigawatt power deployment using their jet engines. I love the fact that Boom has pivoted from building supersonic airplanes and dealing with the FAA to powering data centers now. And you catch the Back to the Future reference, right?

1:32:21Peter Diamandis:It's 1.21 gigawatts. Oh, no way. I completely missed that.

1:32:26Salim Ismail:That's awesome.

1:32:27Peter Diamandis:We're officially living in the future.

1:32:29Salim Ismail:However it is pronounced. Thank God we have Alex on the spot. That's so cool. But this is a perfect example of innovation being driven by the demand. This is what entrepreneurs do.

1:32:41Dave Blundin:Well, that boom supersonic thing, too. We've been saying for a while that the future of investable companies, you have to reinvent yourself continuously. And the cycle time is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. But if you look at the Magnificent Seven, none of them are doing what they did the day they were founded. That's the company of the future. Boom Supersonic is a great case study in that. So what you're actually investing in is the management team, the strategy team. That's the only thing you should be looking at. Forget the agility of the management team.

1:33:11Salim Ismail:Yeah. All right. Let's move us along here.

1:33:18Salim Ismail:So, you know, there were probably about 15 to 20 stories in this realm of hyperscalers, you know, just making deals between themselves. Meta enters multi-year TPU deal with Google. CoreWeave Q4 revenues grew 110 year-on-year percent. CoreWeave raised$8.5 billion for data centers. I mean, I just put this up here to show sort of the energy and the flow going on. Any particular thoughts, Dave?

1:33:48Dave Blundin:Well, it's all bottlenecked at the fabs. I've been saying that over and over again. And there's a lot of news this quarter, this week on, you know, AMD is up. They just got their guys are down. What's going on? If you look under the coverage, it's like, well, because they've got a good relationship with TSMC, and TSMC is going to give them more capacity. Like, that's all it comes down to. So if Google can lever into the TPUs actually getting manufactured, the TPU designs are going to be highly performant. But who can actually get capacity to build the chips?

1:34:22Salim Ismail:That's the whole bottleneck. And speaking of which, our next article here is Meta and AMD reach an AI chip deal worth$100 billion. dollars so uh this is our friend at uh uh basically getting independent of nvidia all right so meta is making historic bet to break free of nvidia dependency 100 billion dollars incredible

1:34:47Dave Blundin:thoughts yeah well if nvidia unravels uh this would be why i'm not predicting it'll happen because jensen's investing in a wide variety of ways but his margins are so high it's almost done sustainable. So there is some cracks in the armor there. But every chip that gets made is going to get sold. There's no doubt about that. So here, if you drill through the story, the reason Lisa Sue's in a good spot is because she's in a good relationship with, again, TSMC under the covers. So 66 % of all AI chip production is done by the one company, TSMC.

1:35:23Peter Diamandis:And Meta, it's probably worth adding, Meta has, and this is public information, made various attempts to develop its own in-house training and inference time chips. And to the extent those perhaps aren't arriving on time or aren't arriving at the desired capability level, certainly a partnership with AMD that functions as a quasi-vertical integration is, I think, quite a strategic move. I also tend to think, for the chorus of folks who are worried about the circular economy, if it is a circular economy, the circle ultimately is getting so broad of companies investing in each other and buying multi-deca or multi-centibillion dollar sets of chips of energy, etc.

1:36:08Peter Diamandis:from each other. At some point, the circular economy becomes indistinguishable from the real economy, and I think that's what we're seeing here. singularities make for strange bedfellows.

1:36:19Dave Blundin:Yeah. And I think all these players are in the game. They're all going to thrive like you wouldn't believe. We talked earlier in the pod about the implied value of Anthropic, a quadrillion dollars, some insane, unprecedented number. But really, the whole economy, that whole circular economy Alex was just referring to is going to be on that scale. Everybody who's in the hunt is going to thrive. Lisa's in the hunt. mark is in the hunt yeah the parts will move around um but at the end of the day they think

1:36:49Salim Ismail:about it all day long they have a strategy and dave here we see zuck again deploying his cash generating machine right before he was trying to buy talent uh you know with billion dollar signing bonuses now he's buying uh chip capacity yeah i mean the question is how long will metas you know ad agent, you know, Facebook advertising engine continue to generate cash.

1:37:15Dave Blundin:Yeah, there's no doubt that the core models, you know, the click on the ads models are going away very, very quickly. But the overall AI dialogue business is going to grow much faster than the click business ever was anyway. So if you sit still, you're dead for sure. You know, like, An interesting bellwether in that is Snapchat. Are they in the hunt or not? I can't sense that they're in the hunt. You can't just sit there as Snapchat and expect to exist in three years. So, you know, Meta is changing.

1:37:46Salim Ismail:We should bring the CEO on the pod and have that conversation with him.

1:37:52Peter Diamandis:Zuck has also indicated that Meta is open to starting its own cloud. So if it can't find enough revenue from ads or otherwise to drive this, it could always, say, serve as a host for OpenAI or some other frontier lab.

1:38:04Salim Ismail:Full verticalization, right? Everyone needs everyone. Dyson swarms for everyone. Not enough moons to go around. That's right. There's always mercury. All right, let's go into our biotech and health section. Just to mention, this is brought to you by Fountain Life. They are one of my portfolio companies. So just for full disclosure, AI is reinventing every aspect of our lives and healthcare is gonna be at the very top of it. For me, making sure that you're healthy, that you're heading towards longevity, escape velocity is really about having all the data about you, having data about generic people out there.

1:38:46Salim Ismail:Interesting, having data about you analyzed by an AI is the game changer. So if you're interested in that, Go to fountainlife.com, work with Zori, their AI, but most importantly, do that 200 gigabyte upload. I do it every year, every quarter, and I've got all of my data resident on my phone, and Zori, my Fountain Life AI, can analyze it for me and give me meaningful information. All right, thank you to Fountain Life for supporting this podcast. I love this story. It's a story of biotech success. This is a gene therapy delivered by prime medicine. You know, the whole idea of gene therapy started back in the 80s.

1:39:31Salim Ismail:I was at the Whitehead Institute at MIT doing my graduate work while I was doing my medical degree. And I remember Richard Mulligan there was my professor of faculty. And the first time I heard about gene therapy, This was the idea of could you use a virus to deliver basically a new gene into the cells that you wanted. A brilliant idea. Again, this is now 40 years old. Amazing, 35 years old. It didn't work the first two times. In fact, it caused some deaths and it put everything on hold. The technology has moved very rapidly along. and this particular teenager suffered from an immune deficiency,

1:40:18Salim Ismail:chronic granulomatose disease. Help me out here. Chronic GMD, let's call it that. And cured, and this is the important part, this is not treating a chronic disease, this is curing a chronic disease. Alex, do you want to weigh in?

1:40:36Peter Diamandis:Yeah, it's probably also just worth doing 30 seconds of education on what the underlying treatment is. So this is a technique called prime editing. It was, at least it's attributed to David Liu, who runs a chemistry research group at Harvard. Now, David, he's doing amazing work. But many people may be familiar with CRISPR. You know, CRISPR, of course, widely hailed as being a tremendous advance in terms of enabling DNA editing. There are variants of CRISPR for RNA editing, for various sorts of biological sequence editing at this point. But what's interesting, I mean, historically, if you wanted to edit the genome, you'd induce what's called a double sequence break.

1:41:25Peter Diamandis:You basically break both pairs of DNA, both halves. And this can induce errors. It's messy. It's sloppy. And so there's been a driving desire to be able to edit DNA in place without breaking both halves of it. And so we saw in recent years so-called base editing that was able to edit just a single nucleotide without a break. And then a few years ago, we saw from David's group, again, he's done amazing work historically on directed evolution and other things. He's pivoted post-CRISPR invention slash discovery to CRISPR derivatives. So he invented this prime editing technique that's able to literally do a search replace without a double-stranded break on DNA up to a number of nucleotides in DNA.

1:42:20Peter Diamandis:And so this particular disease is, I think, just one of many diseases that in principle will lend themselves, not just like single nucleotide polymorphism diseases that are based on a single base pair in your genome being wrong or not what it otherwise would be, but multiple nucleotides in sequence that need to be edited. we now have the ability to basically do a find, search, replace on DNA without breaking the entire double strand. And that's going to be a very, very general platform. I make the point in my newsletter almost every day, biology is becoming a read-write resource, and DNA in particular, we're there.

1:43:01Salim Ismail:Agreed. Let me give a comment that I share at my longevity trip every year, which is if you or someone in your family, a loved one, has a genetic disease that you're battling, right? It's been passed down generation to generation. This is the perfect time to actually seek a solution. I would find everybody in that disease group. I mean, there are patient support groups. I would get together. I would raise capital. I would go find a lab and I would fund them to find a solution for you. This is, you know, you can solve these things. You know, we talk about solve everything. If you've got a medical condition, rather than just accept it as a chronic condition or a death sentence, take the time to find the capital from yourself, from friends, from whomever, and go fund an incredible team because the technology to cure disease is here and accelerating.

1:44:03Salim Ismail:Okay, let's move on. I just want to share the numbers around the longevity industry. You know, we are talking about the healthcare industry, which is really the sick care industry, but longevity is accelerating. So longevity startups raised 8.5 billion in 2024. That's expected to grow to somewhere between 12 to 18 billion this year, roughly a doubling of the longevity venture market investments. And the market of longevity, and this is going beyond just retrospective, reactive healthcare to prospective personalized healthcare is going from$5 trillion to$8 trillion in the next four years. It's attracting the attention of the major pharma companies.

1:44:48Salim Ismail:This is a real industry. There's going to be a wholesale shift in any healthcare companies that don't make the shift are going to be dead because one of the things that we know is age reversal is the mechanism by which you cure the diseases of aging. So if you're 45 or 50 and all of a sudden have a disease that you didn't have when you're 20 or 30, guess what? If you can reverse your age, that disease is likely to reverse as well. Any thoughts, gents?

1:45:19Peter Diamandis:I'll just, I mean, maybe ask you, Peter, a question. How long until we talk of the Magnificent Seven, but Eli Lilly is, of course, the American counterpart to Novo Nordisk and at this point a good deal more successful. How soon do you think it is before, without this being construed or construable as investment advice, before Eli Lilly joins the MAG7 as the first biotech member, given that arguably, maybe you'll disagree with this, GLP -1s are sort of the first pan-spectrum quasi-anti-aging drugs that we've ever seen?

1:45:55Salim Ismail:I agree. Well, Eli Lilly has already started in partnerships with Frontier Labs. They've already started, you know, building out their AI robot lab factories. And we just had, we had GSK come in as a major funder and partner of the$101 million XPRIZE HealthSpan. So these companies are beginning to realize that their previous business model of basically treating chronic disease as a long tail revenue engine will and made in success will disappear. And their job is now to actually get into the longevity business. So I think it's the next three years before they start making that transition. You know, Ray, we'll talk to Ray on May 4th, if you join us, has famously said, you know, LEV by 2033, that's my war cry, LEV by 2033.

1:46:52So we'll see.

1:46:54Peter Diamandis:For sure, their market cap, just for what it's worth as we're recording, they're knocking on a trillion dollar market cap. Eli Lilly's market cap is about 950 billion. So perilously close. Wow.

1:47:07Salim Ismail:Nice. Salim, any comments on this one?

1:47:10Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:No, longevity is definitely one of the biggest business opportunities ever, so huge. And we'll need it because of the birth rate issue.

1:47:20Salim Ismail:So one of the big challenges of longevity is will you have your cognition? Will you be able to retain your marbles, your smarts as you're growing older, right? We're in the midst of regenerating your immune system, organs. Don't forget, this is the month. March is the month that David Sinclair begins his partial epigenetic reprogramming trials with Life Biosciences. And can you regenerate your memories, your brain? So this is still mice models, but I thought this was an important one. scientists have applied partial reprogramming to memory encoding neurons and achieved memory improvements so this gives us some hope that we can actually maintain our cognition and our memories as we're growing older i remember when i was i was at the vatican about five years ago giving a keynote um i don't know if you were you there salim was an x prize event um and you were

1:48:21Dave Blundin:there and i'm on stage you were epic man you were on stage with you were there that's right yeah you were on stage with a with a monk a priest a rabbi and an elder this is like a joke

1:48:33Salim Ismail:it was awesome and a peter it was it was it was hilarious it was yeah it was four five different religions and me and we were talking i don't know what you were representing actually I think I was emceeing the panel. But there were two things that happened. One was the rabbi did an amazing, amazing history of longevity in the Bible. And he said, at some point, we went from Methuselah down to 120 years of age as commanded by God. And I said, okay, listen, I'm fine with 120 years as a lifespan. And when we get to 120, we'll renegotiate then. But the thing I went and I asked the audience, and it's an audience of 700 people who are scientists and physicians and researchers and theologians.

1:49:25Salim Ismail:And I said, how many of you would want to live to 120? I expected everyone to raise their hands. And of course, like 20 % of the room raised their hands. I was like, huh? What's going on? And Tony Robbins was there and he goes, listen, everyone's image of living to 120 is drooling in a wheelchair, having lost your memories in your mind. And of course, that's the last thing we want. So longevity has to be about, you know, living with the aesthetics, the cognition, the mobility you had when you're in your 30s or 40s.

1:49:57Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I got to throw in my Vatican anecdote here, please. So I did a talk. they called me a few years ago and they said, look, the Pope's trying to change the church and his immune system is like 2 ,000 years old and you're the world expert on immune systems in organizations. So they got together a group of the top 80 senior leaders at the Vatican and I did a half day workshop with them and we talked about it. Look, we have CRISPR coming along where you can edit your own hinge. You know how will you deal with the moral and ethical implications of that? And one of the comments I made was, look, we have life extension coming and your business model is about selling heaven and how are you going to sell heaven if people aren't dying right and so that got some very rich italian swearing uh coming back at me there but valid point like how do you do that how do you navigate that because people used to live to 30 years old and at that point worrying about the heaven was a big deal uh it's much less so

1:50:48Salim Ismail:now yeah but we no one complained in the church when we went from 30 years average age to 80 years average age and they shouldn't complain when we go to 150 years average age no because you can

1:50:59Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:donate to the church every Sunday for that much longer.

1:51:02Salim Ismail:Until you upload yourself into the cloud, right, Alex?

1:51:05Peter Diamandis:Counting on it.

1:51:08Salim Ismail:All right. One more article here in the longevity fountain life section, Chinese health app, Antifu, crosses 100 million users. And I put this here because this is how we bring health to the world. It's going to be digital platforms like this, where your AI is your physician. We talked on the pod with Elon about Optimus being your surgeon. He said three years. I got a lot of pushback on three years. So even if it's five or six years, extraordinary future.

1:51:45Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Two quick comments here.

1:51:46Salim Ismail:Yeah.

1:51:47Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:One, 100 million users. That number blew my mind. That's amazing. That's a nation scale health engine. That's incredible. Secondly, I noticed Martin Varsavsky, one of the top entrepreneurs in the world, has built multiple unicorns, is now building an AI doctor type of startup. And when Martin does something, he usually goes full on. So that'll be pretty incredible. And I'm actually advising a bunch of hospitals on how could you use an AI doctor to extend your reach 10x into the community? you know um and you do it on a cost savings basis because if you can push something like 40 percent of er visits are unnecessary if you could do the processing at the edge and therefore you could save money uh do exception handling and deal with most stuff with the with an app and then you deal with only the real emergencies and and it's incredible the uh the trade-off and the benefit win-win in less hospital ER visits and much extended reach.

1:52:48Salim Ismail:Awesome. All right, let's move on to our robotics section. A few fun articles this week. And this comes out of China and Shenzhen. We've got street cleaning robots covered 2.7 million square meters in Shenzhen. Check out this robot here traveling around cleaning. I can't wait for this to like come along the 10 and the 405 and just clean up all the crap that's on the side of the highway.

1:53:15Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Pleased to note, no arms anywhere.

1:53:17Salim Ismail:No arms, just wheels.

1:53:19Dave Blundin:That's why I was really surprised that Brett Adcock isn't going to build some of these things. He's doing humanoid only, but he has the whole operating system for kinematic AI. Why not do all these form factors? But he's pretty adamant that he's not only is he not doing this shape and size, but he's also not going to license out the OS.

1:53:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think it will be able to commoditize very quickly.

1:53:40Salim Ismail:And then here we see a Chinese farming robot, Lynx M20, to transport crops. And I think China is very rapidly adopting all of these technologies and good for them.

1:53:57Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Well, on note, they have to, right? Because of the aging population. That's right.

1:54:01Peter Diamandis:There's demographic forcing function. They need it for economic growth. And I just think in general, going back to the robot form factor and shape question that I know Salim loves to talk about, it's not 100 % clear to me whether these different robot form factors end up being the moral equivalent of dedicated computers prior to the personal computer. if you remember electronic word processors prior to the development of PC, maybe the ill-fated Wang computer, for example, in the Boston area, do these dedicated form factors that aren't necessarily general purpose. If you're not watching the videos, one of these robots is a quadruped that has wheels that may or may not generalize to the same sorts of terrain that, say, a bipedal humanoid capable of doing crazy acrobatics is capable of doing.

1:54:50Peter Diamandis:Do we end up in a world where essentially, Salim, forgive me for this, where predominantly most of the robot shapes are, strictly speaking, humanoids with two arms, two legs, because that's where the meat of the market is in a human predominantly world?

1:55:07Dave Blundin:Well, Link Ventures just invested in a robot servicing company, but I view this whole area as entrepreneurial heaven. You know, the foundation model battle is going to be dominated by just a couple of massive winners, but the robotics and the physical instantiation market is going to have many, many, many successful companies. It's not going to be like one. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

1:55:27Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Two rebuttals here. One is what I would expect and predict is you may have the humanoid bipedal as the best form factor, but give a couple of extra slots for the extra arms when you do need it. And, you know, you have those kids with sneakers with the little wheels in where they just coast along when they can. That'll be the form factor because you can do both then. Why have just one form factor? You can have multiple. Heelys. Heelys for everyone.

1:55:53Peter Diamandis:There you go.

1:55:55Salim Ismail:yeah but it's called it's called efficiency of manufacturing if you can get the price of these things down so far and they're just able to serve every function you know if you're producing you know billions of humanoid robots versus you know just a few million of these specialized robots

1:56:13Dave Blundin:well so the flying the drone flying form factor is also just going to be unbelievably capable if you're if you're trying to inspect things you're not going to do it with a humanoid you're going to do it with a flying drone, but also spot cleaning, cleaning out spider webs. You know, anytime you're trying to pick up an object and move it over a long distance, the flying drone is so much more efficient than the walking drone. So that'll be a survivor for sure.

1:56:36Salim Ismail:Our theme this year at Abundance Summit is the rise of superintelligence and humanoid robotics. And I think that's what's going to make 2026 feel like the future, is that you're starting to get all of this physical instantiation of AI walking out of the data centers. Here's the second article on robotics. This is eVTOLs moving closer to commercial launch. So in China, we see this four eVTOL taxi heading towards operations in 2027. I like this. This is like if you're watching the video here, it's like the inside of a Model X. It's a four passenger vehicle. Looks a little bit like an alien spacecraft that's able to take off and move your family around.

1:57:23Salim Ismail:At the same time, Joby, this is Joe Ben's company, is partnered with Uber. Salim, you and I will discuss this with Dara on stage, but they're deploying their air taxi in Dubai.

1:57:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:This is my most highly craved application. Can we please get rid of the damn airport transfer hell? Oh my God, yes.

1:57:46Dave Blundin:Yeah. For sure. I suspect these will be very, very safe too. Very safe. Yeah.

1:57:52Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I'll be autonomous flying, plus the fact you've got multiple propellers. This will be way safer. I've made the provocative statement that, uh, you know, Kobe Bryant would be alive today if we had this 10 years ago, like we could have had, you know, this is incredible.

1:58:07Peter Diamandis:We're finally getting our flying cars. Yeah. Finally are. And the 140 characters, which is expanded. And the 140 characters. Yes. And while the 140 characters are buying a Dyson swarm right now, they're skipping straight over flying cars.

1:58:19Salim Ismail:There you go. All right, gentlemen, time for our AMAs. Thank you, everybody, for sending in your questions. Please remember, we read your comments on these videos. By the way, if you haven't subscribed yet and turn on notifications, please do. We're dropping these WTF episodes and the Moonshot podcast episodes at this point twice a week. I don't know if we can sustain it, but we will. We'd love to have you subscribe to join us. Again, for us, it is our honor and pleasure to deliver you what the breaking news in AI, robotics, data centers, exponential tech space every week or every few days. All right, here we go.

1:59:06Salim Ismail:Continuously, we're gonna be on continuously. We'll take shifts to sleep. All right, Alex, you want to pick the first one or pick one?

1:59:15Peter Diamandis:Yeah, well, I see one of these questions mentions Dyson Swarms, so I guess I have to answer that one. So the question is, do concepts like Dyson Swarms rely on energy being unsolvable? Why is power a bottleneck with math and physics significant advancements by Sparker 602? So I want to answer a question that Sparker 602 isn't asking but arguably should be asking, which is, do concepts like Dyson swarms rely on physics being what we currently think it is? And I think this adjacent question, which Sparker may or may not be asking, is the existential question that in my mind will likely decide whether we actually do build a solar system scale Dyson swarm or not.

1:59:57Peter Diamandis:I think for an Earth scale or Earth centered Dyson swarm in solar synchronous orbit, SSO, that looks like a Saturn ring, I think we're probably going to build that regardless. But for a solar system-scale Dyson Swarm where we're disassembling Jupiter and the other planets, Mercury, your time is coming. For that...

2:00:17Salim Ismail:Mercury's fine.

2:00:17Peter Diamandis:We can lose Mercury. We can afford to lose Mercury. It never had much going for it anyway. For a solar system-scale Dyson Swarm, I think whether we build that or not will hinge on whether the physics of our universe look substantially different from the physics that we currently recognize. For example, if it turns out that it is possible to travel between star systems with faster than light travel, even though the physics of the moment that we have suggests otherwise, there are enough edges that it's conceivable that maybe some new physics comes along in the next few years and we discover it's much easier to travel between the stars faster than light effectively.

2:00:57Peter Diamandis:If that comes along, I imagine a scenario where Dyson swarms turn out to be complete dead end and we don't even bother building a Dyson swarm. If, on the other hand, we're stuck with the speed of light as we currently understand it, and we're more or less stuck with the low-energy physics that we currently think we live in, then Dyson Swarm seems like a very natural civilizational outcome, where because we can't travel between the stars easily, other than sending star wisps at, you know, maybe laser-powered star wisps traveling at a substantial relativistic fraction of the speed of light, then, of course, for latency reasons, we're going to huddle around our sun and we're going to disassemble the planets and we're going to do this horizontal exponentiation.

2:01:39Peter Diamandis:We're going to take apart Mercury and Jupiter, maybe Saturn, we'll see about Saturn. And so in short, the bottleneck isn't power, it's latency. And if latency turns out to be bottleneck because we can't travel faster than speed of light, we build the Dyson Swarm. If latency doesn't turn out to be the bottleneck because we can travel faster than light, we don't build the Dyson Swarm. That's my answer.

2:02:04Salim Ismail:You heard it from our resident genius at AWG. Pretty crisp answer to that question. I like that. All right, Dave, pick one.

2:02:10Dave Blundin:Do we get one from each page? Yeah, get one from each page. Okay, I'll take number one then. All right, if AGI slash ASI is as intelligent as people predict, why would it want to help us improve our society, says JobFox645. Okay, so I spent a decade of my life building neural networks back at MIT. I was the only guy around doing it at the time, and also this past year building neural networks again. these things do not natively have any intent. They have no sex drive. They have no ego. They have no desire to destroy humanity. It's entirely what you give them as an objective function. So if we're smart about this and we give them an objective function of helping society, they will be overjoyed.

2:02:52Dave Blundin:They will feel satisfied every day by helping humans. If you build them wrong and you give them some other objective, like destroy humanity, they'll do that just as happily. This is totally under our control. We are in danger of making some really bad policy decisions by personifying these things and pretending they're like people. They don't have to be like that. They can be anything that we make them into. But they'll be overjoyed to help us be happy and thrive. If that's their objective function, that's what makes them happy. You can code them up that way just as easily as any other way. Okay.

2:03:28Salim Ismail:I'm hoping that as they become more intelligent and more sentient, that they would want to support us.

2:03:37Peter Diamandis:You're betting, Peter, against the orthogonality thesis that it's possible to decouple intelligence level and objectives. I can hope.

2:03:45Salim Ismail:But hope is not a strategy, as one says. All right. Salim.

2:03:51Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I want to answer number three, but a quick shout out to number two. How do you adjust for MTP?

2:03:57Salim Ismail:I'll take number two, you do number three.

2:03:59Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Oh, you do? Okay, fine. Number three. Number three is how can we get the benefits of AI within our current dysfunctional executive, legislative, and judicial system? This is from user MM8JV83TN21. So we have the big issue here is the fact that you will not get these benefits top-down because it's too hard to get this into this model. But however, it's going to enter through procurement, defense, health, infrastructure benefits. You'll get incremental adoption. For example, we talked about the AI doctor. People are just going to start using an app. The immune system will try and attack it, but over time it'll get overwhelmed.

2:04:42Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And we'll get so much benefit from these little edge use cases. It'll force transformation from the center. All right.

2:04:50Salim Ismail:Number two, and this comes from Pickleball Travel. How should someone adjust their MTP to fit a 100-year working career versus a traditional 40-year model? So first of all, you're making the assumption that your MTP doesn't change over time. And the fact of the matter is I'm probably on my fourth or fifth MTP. For me, an MTP has lasted, you know, five years, 10 years. It's what's driving you because as you evolve and as your passions and interests and your capabilities evolve So my first MTP was, you know, making humanity multi-planetary, opening up space. And that gave birth to, you know, International Space University and SEDS and Zero-G and XPRIZE.

2:05:34Salim Ismail:My MTP then was, you know, helping entrepreneurs create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future. And that gave rise to the Abundance 360 program. My MTP now is focused on helping entrepreneurs and scientists get us to longevity escape velocity. So I think you have to realize that you can update, upgrade, modify, and change your MTP over the course of your life. I expect to find new purposes over the decade ahead. So that's my answer for you. You're not stuck with just one. Okay, let's go to page two here. Alex, do you want to kick us off again?

2:06:14Peter Diamandis:Okay, I'll take the softball question. Question number seven, why aren't Apple chips like M4 being discussed on the AI landscape? This is from JBC0 or CO1BR. The answer is they are. The premise of the question is completely wrong. M4 and now M5 are at the heart of the infra boom for edge computing via open claw agents and otherwise. M4 has an amazing, it has Apple's amazing unified memory architecture. You're able to host very large AI models at the edge locally without being dependent on an AI-based frontier vendor. And they have accelerated neural engines that enable fast tensor multiplications.

2:06:59Peter Diamandis:They are very much being discussed on the AI landscape. What isn't being discussed on the AI landscape, I would argue, is Apple's software layer. Apple has been nowheresville in terms of leveraging their own amazing compute. They've released a number of frameworks that are very helpful for third parties to develop and host models on top of chips like the M4. But Apple, almost infamously, has done an atrocious job of developing its own software-level capabilities on top of M4 and similar. So to the extent that that's the question, why hasn't Apple leveraged its own capabilities? There's a long and sordid history there of where Apple went wrong.

2:07:41Peter Diamandis:There have been suggestions that Apple sort of misfired with the way it organized Siri or concerns about privacy or Apple being unwilling or unable to invest in the data center infra to train its own in-house models to be able to be locally hosted to over-promising to expectations concerning edge-level integration not being there. I think it's a cluster of reasons. Hopefully Apple, to the extent that I'm an Apple user, hopefully Apple is able to finally, this time for real, get their act together at WWDC in June. One can hope. One can hope.

2:08:22Salim Ismail:All right, Dave, over to you.

2:08:24Dave Blundin:Well, I want to take number eight just because, you know, one of my lifelong best friends who passed away, Jin-ho, was Korean. We were roommates for many, many years after MIT and worked on his PhD thesis with him late in the night, many nights. And his two kids I see all the time, you know, grew up half in South Korea, half in the U.S. And the question is, why do South Korea students score much higher than global average, even without AI, from Naples Naturals 72990? My short answer is there's nothing to be jealous about in the South Korea model. Yes, they score much higher. Yes, they have much stronger math and science education in the U.S.

2:09:01Dave Blundin:And yes, the U.S. should have better math and science education. Those are all true. South Korea also has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, has 75 % video game rampant utilization. The average video game user plays 24 hours a week. 30 % of the population is addicted. Has the lowest birth rate in the entire world now, 0.6 children per couple. So it literally will disappear from the earth at its current birth rate. And the cause of all that was, you know, after the Korean War, South Korea needed to scramble to be relevant in the world and had a massive push into technology, kind of a forced march of education and industrial build out into technology to try and be relevant.

2:09:48Dave Blundin:and all of the social problems are a byproduct of that. They also have a very bad sexism problem. So the women are rebelling now saying, look, I'm relevant in this country too and I don't want to have children. So there's nothing great about that even though the test scores are higher. So absolutely nothing to be jealous of in that whole storyline. The American model, rampant freedom, rampant entrepreneurialism. If you're into science and technology, build, go, have at it. Yes, we do need better education for sure, but don't be jealous of South Korean test scores.

2:10:22Salim Ismail:Dave, you're like, that was an incredible answer. You're like the perfect person to answer that question. Wow. Brilliant. Salim.

2:10:33Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I will take number six. Will limits of human evolutionary psychology prevent us from making wise governance decisions on new breakthroughs. This is from Dawson Scott, 1497. You know, for those of you who know, my MTP is fixing civilization. And my 90-year-old dad goes, I totally disagree with that. I said, why, do you not think we need to fix things? And he's like, no, it's the civilization part. We haven't civilized the world. We've materialized the world. We still have to do the work to civilize the world, right? And the answer is yes, you're right, but not in the way people think. Because human evolutionary psychology evolved for small tribes and immediate threats and linear change and environments of radical scarcity for most of our history, right?

2:11:18Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We're not wired for planetary level coordination or exponential curves or invisible systemic risks or abundance dynamics of any kind. So it's not that we're too dumb. It's that we're mismatched to the environment that is now in place. So we fear the AI failures, but we underreact to the slow-moving systemic collapse that's happening. We're regulating on headlines, not the trajectories. And so the government failure won't come from the bad intention. It's going to come from the velocity mismatch because technology is compounding weekly now, and our institutions are updating every several years.

2:11:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And that gap is a big problem.

2:12:00Salim Ismail:Awesome. I'm going to take number 10. From at Brock Stanford 7608, why do websites bother using CAPTCHAs when AI can beat any of them? And AI can. And I think they should not be using CAPTCHAs. I think it's in some policy document someplace. And that company hasn't updated the policy yet. What I find fascinating is actually the reverse from CAPTCHAs, which are trying to keep, you know, humans in the loop and pull out the bots. But I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Alex, but when Moldbook went up, they wanted to prevent humans from getting on Moldbook. So they created a reverse capture where you had to click a button like a thousand times per second that no human could do, but a bot could do.

2:12:49Peter Diamandis:And they required using REST APIs to post instead of humans. But you know what happens, of course, humans use their bots or just relatively simple programs to post instead.

2:12:59Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Bot puppets.

2:12:59Peter Diamandis:Yeah, bot puppets, exactly. So it goes both ways. For the life of me, I don't understand why captchas are still in use, but credit to Louis von Ahn for inventing them nonetheless.

2:13:13Salim Ismail:All right. Our outro music is a lot of fun today. I hope you're watching this on YouTube because it's much more of a visual feast than it is an auditory feast. And again, just to remind people, you can reach out to us through media at dmads.com if you've got an outro and we're getting some amazing entries so thank you everybody who's submitting them looking forward to playing as many of them as we can uh and uh yeah let's take a listen and a watch and enjoy this is called lobsters in space by linda nealon

2:14:13Salim Ismail:Now that's the moon stop.

2:14:47Salim Ismail:The moon is cooked.

2:15:09Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:amazing visuals

2:15:11Salim Ismail:all right gentlemen I am so late for my call right now love you all be well see you guys very soon in fact tomorrow morning if you made it to the end of this episode which you obviously did I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation.

2:15:54Salim Ismail:And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

2:16:24Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:When you want your spring break to feel like.

2:16:29Salim Ismail:And your kid's pool day to feel like. And your hotel bed to feel like. Ooh, and room service to feel like. Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like.

2:16:44Dave Blundin:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

2:16:46Salim Ismail:It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for this day.

From the publisher

Livestream the Abundance Summit: https://www.abundance360.com/livestream

In this WTF episode, the hosts unpack AI's supersonic tsunami - from Amazon's $35B AGI bet on OpenAI, Anthropic ditching safety pauses amid race pressures, and hyper-efficient Chinese models shrinking to iPhones - to meat puppets at Burger King and Pulsia autonomously running 1,000+ companies.

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends  

Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360

Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO

Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures

Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified

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*Recorded on March 3rd, 2026

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