Google I/O 2026, Karpathy Joins Anthropic, and Cerebras’ $95B IPO | EP #256

20:08Peter Diamandis:Well, remember when I opened saying there were highlights, lowlights, and then, to use the colloquialism, mid. I would call Gemini 3.5 flash solidly mid. If you look at its capabilities, And others have pointed this out as well. Just from a raw capability standpoint, not talking about throughput or cost, it doesn't compare favorably with, say, GPT 5.5 high or X high or pro. On the other hand, this is a flash series model, so it's not pro yet. Sundar sort of infamously at this point has said Gemini 3.5 pro, that's coming out in another month. There were groans in the audience at the time. So this isn't intended to be top of range.

20:53Peter Diamandis:I think the strategy, if I were to play Kremlinologist here, the strategy is I think Google is sort of solidly tier one and a half at this point in the race to raw frontier capabilities. capabilities. 3.5 flash represents perhaps pushing the optimal frontier in terms of throughput versus performance, that optimal frontier. But I think it's also very telling that Sundar is highlighting throughput versus performance instead of like number of tokens on the x-axis, input tokens versus performance, or rather output tokens on the x-axis versus performance on the y-axis or some other metric. He picked the most flattering possible metric.

21:35Peter Diamandis:And if you actually - And they all do. Everyone picks flattering metrics, but some metrics, some flattering metrics are also more sort of truthful than others in some global sense. And if you look at the metrics that Google's been highlighting, A, their note, it's very telling, 3.5 flash is being compared primarily with 3.1 Pro, less with Frontier other models. But secondly, the areas, the benchmarks where it's really excelling are benchmarks where tool use, in particular, really aggressive tool use is needed. So if I had to squint at this, I would say the emphasis in Google wasn't necessarily beating the frontier with 3.5 flash.

22:20Peter Diamandis:It was probably, I would say, some combination of throughput maxing and tool use maxing, not pushing the boundaries of the frontier. But solid release nonetheless. less. It's nice that Google's still in the game. And Dave, I'm imagining you, we've talked about, you know, the labs pulling their punches. I imagine that, you know, releasing, there'll be, you know, the next version of GPT will come out. And then of course, you know, Pro will come out right after that.

22:48Dave Blundin:Well, the scuttlebutt here in Silicon Valley is that it's a two horse race between open AI and Anthropic for the best AI in the world. And the talent is flooding into those two buildings in SF. And nothing in that demo or in the vibe on campus at Google contradicts that. So here, you pointed out earlier that Google, or Alex pointed out, that Google is the one remaining horse in the race to the consumer. And this is a very, very fast model that gives the consumer a much better experience. But the other labs have already pivoted to the enterprise and said, look, we're giving up on that. We're going totally after these massive enterprise budgets.

23:27Dave Blundin:And they, you know, if you try and build something sophisticated with AI, you want the smartest AI that solves the problem. And you're not going to back off to a faster model that's not quite as intelligent. You just can't. And so they're going full bore after self-improvement at the other labs. The other difference from a year ago is, you know, Google's unstoppable war chest, you know, 180 billion in CapEx per year and rising. But the other guys in the interim raised, you know, OpenAI raised$120 billion in cash. And they'll burn that pretty quickly. And Anthropic is on a similar trajectory now.

23:59Dave Blundin:So the war chests are actually not as different as they were a year ago. So, yeah, I think that's the only disappointing thing in the whole show is the best of the best Gemini is not up there with Mythos as far as we know. Now, I will say that Google doesn't, you know, they do soft sell. They don't announce what's coming in four months and promote and trumpet it because they don't need to. And so if something really, really big is cooking and coming soon, they didn't roll it out, but they don't need to roll it out. They'll wait until it's proven. You know, I love the naming nomenclature here. Of course, we've got GPT models, you know, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and Gemini jumps from 3.1 to 3.5.

24:49It's fascinating. Salim, what do you make of this?

24:53Dave Blundin:I thought one thing that's clear is you're seeing this kind of bifurcation now between premium cognition and ultra cheap but very fast cognition. And I think that's going to continue. I think Alex makes a great point about throughput. But this will allow a lot of throughput. Right. And there's this continuous march for marginal intelligence cost trends towards zero. Yeah. Here was the next segment that I pulled out. And again, I want to just a shout out to Gianluca, who clipped all these beautifully and provided them in record time for us for the show. Yeah. A conversation about Synth ID and content credentialing, really important, especially as we start to encroach on reality.

25:38How do you know if something is or is not AI generated? It's going to become more and more important than ever before. Or let's take a look here at Sundar talking about SynthiD. Since launch, SynthiD has now watermarked over 100 billion images and videos, along with 60 ,000 years of audio assets. We are now going a step further and adding content credentials verification across products. This will show you if the origin of the content was AI or a camera and if it's been edited with generative AI tools. In this example, Gemini can tell this photo was captured with a pixel camera and then edited with Google Photos.

26:21Of course, this only works at scale if more partners decide to watermark their own AI-generated content. NVIDIA signed on to SynthID last year. And today, I'm thrilled to announce that OpenAI, Kakao, and Levin Labs are adopting SynthID, too. I love the fact that we're getting to standards and everybody's picking the best. Alex, how important is this?

26:47Peter Diamandis:You know, the irony is so many people were hand-wringing over the past few years that we won't know what's real and what isn't. And my response was always, we're going to get cryptographic, eventually cryptographic chains of custody from reality capture to what is ultimately presented to the user. in the same sense that when you use a browser, you can maybe see a little lock icon to indicate end-to-end SSL encryption. We're going to get the same thing for reality. And I've used SynthID, which, by the way, was also just adopted by OpenAI. It was created by Google, now also adopted by OpenAI in the same breath.

27:24Peter Diamandis:I think it's sort of ironic that we're going to get, it seems, end-to-end authentication of realness, proof of reality, if you will, not coming from the camera end, not coming from the reality capture end, coming from the synthetic end, coming from all vendors that want to claim credit in some sense that they were the ones who generated the reality. And then the cameras, the camera makers, and all of the recording device manufacturers, they're going to be downstream and the ones who adopt the same protocol. But either way, we're getting our end-to-end proof of reality one way or another.

28:02Dave Blundin:I think there's a much broader story. I'd love, Salim, to get your thoughts on the bigger, bigger societal implications. Because a big topic at Stanford last night, you know, with Eric Brynjolfsson and his entire team there, the rate that AI is innovating can't be kept up with by Congress. And there's going to be no regulation of any value coming out of Washington. So the industry is starting to self-regulate, and that's the only AI can keep up with AI. And so we may look back on this moment as one of the first moves by the self-regulation community where, okay, now we're going to start watermarking images.

28:40Dave Blundin:Hey, everybody in the community, please adopt our standard for watermarking images. And then there'll be something else a week later, something else a week later, something else a week later. And that'll become the way that we govern ourselves in the future, much more so than any law coming out of Washington. purely because the pace can't keep up. Salim, you think that's basically, this is the first move in that direction? I think that's exactly right. You know, when you have intelligence becoming abundant, then the scarcity goes towards trust and scarcity creates value. So we may end up at a point where authenticity is more valuable than creativity.

29:13Dave Blundin:And that line between something being created and knowing how it was created, et cetera, is now merging because of the systems that are being created now. And I think, Dave, the point you make is really, really important. Once you have that trust layer, right, now you can scale. I go back to Jerry Mikulski, my community member, who said, scarcity equals abundance minus trust, right? And so if you can solve for trust, you solve for abundance. And one of the biggest challenges today, I thought this was really a big deal because we're moving from the information age to the verification age and trust is becoming infrastructure.

29:49Dave Blundin:And I think that's a very powerful valuable pillar for the world going forward.

29:55Peter Diamandis:Selim, just playing arithmetic, does that mean that abundance equals scarcity plus trust?

30:04Dave Blundin:It does. It does. Scarcity plus trust gets you to abundance. How about that? How about that? All right. Thank you for... That's like grade five math. Even I can do that. All right. But, you know, because the cost of generating content is collapsing, right, then the value shifts from signal filtering authenticity. We saw this with photography where the big problem in photography is how do I take the best photograph because each click costs you a dollar. And you had a bunch of business models crop up around like selling expensive cameras or offering courses in photography and publishing books on composition.

30:46Dave Blundin:Then we moved to digital photography. The cost of creating a photograph went to zero. And now the big problem everybody has in photography is I have six copies of my photographs on seven different online services and you can't find anything. And the value then comes in that filtering system. Right. And I'll tell you, Salim, you know, we're moving into this intentional world that we design and everyone's like, what will happen next? What will happen next? Well, it's whatever we design is what's going to happen next. But Dario and Demis are two probably dominant architects in the future of how we live.

31:18Dave Blundin:And it's just great to hear both guys go back and forth. But if you do a raw word count from Dario, Dario Amadei, CEO of Anthropic, and you go back, you know, the words were all about transformer architecture. speeds, intelligence, benchmarks, and then they transitioned to UBI ethics. And now they're talking about the way the world should be governed going forward and writing papers on it. And so if you just track the word count, it's also on this exponential change rate. Same with Demis. You know, Demis has to be a little more cautious because technically he's an employee of Google, even though he acts very independently.

31:52Dave Blundin:But those are the two guys just very much determining the future of all humanity right now. And so, you know, this is a, the watermarking is just like move one, act one of the whole future way we live. And look at what's happening, right? Our trust in legacy institutions is collapsing. And at the same time, AI is building up the capability and the infrastructure and the foundation for delivering trust. So hopefully if that happens elegantly will have an elegant shift from scarcity to abundance rather than a messy one. Hey, everybody. You may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team.

32:32And 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 meta trend 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 meta trends newsletter every week, Go to diamandis.com slash metatrends. That's diamandis.com slash metatrends. The next product that they dove into in a central part of Google's plans is Antigravity. They released Antigravity 2.0, a standalone desktop app built to orchestrate multiple agents to execute tasks in parallel.

33:14Let's take a listen. And then, Alex, I'm coming to you for your evaluation. Mid-tier, high-tier, no-tier? Let's go on. At the core is Antigravity 2.0, a new standalone desktop application that delivers fully on that original glimpse of a truly agent-optimized experience. The new Antigravity is unabashedly agent-first, focusing on the core agent conversations, agent-produced artifacts, and multi-agent orchestration. Like I said, unabashedly agent-first.

33:47Peter Diamandis:As Sundar mentioned, this is the exact experience teams here at Google have been using to drive massive value. Let's take this live and actually show this operating system in action. Try running Doom right now. It just doesn't work. Turns out that the OS is currently missing some necessary video and keyboard drivers. So let's just try and fix it in the new Antigravity. I have a prompt prepared. I'm going to paste it in. Antigravity ended up doing a whole host of research, ended up writing over 100 lines of code, and then finally built the operating system. Let's take a peek and see if it works.

34:22Amazing.

34:25So first off, Alex, what is Antigravity 2.0, and what are you thinking about it?

34:30Peter Diamandis:Yeah. So let's remember where Antigravity came from. Do you remember Google's hackquisition of Windsurf during that debacle? So anti-gravity is basically windsurf rebranded from the windsurf team that was haquahired by Google. And then anti-gravity 1.0 versus 2.0, I view, you were asking earlier, Peter, is this high, mid, low. This is sort of mid, in my mind. If you look at what Cursor has been doing, by contrast, Cursor was much more aggressively leaning from their old interface, which was sort of a re-skinned Visual Studio Code, code-centric editor from their 1.0-oriented user interface to their more recent interface, which is agent-first.

35:15Peter Diamandis:I view this almost as like a copycat fast follow or slow follow or somewhere in between from the Windsurf team within GDM. They're basically following the same metaphor of saying, no, we're no longer about direct code editing access now. Now, the primary metaphor is orchestrating fleets of code agents that are doing all of the hard work. So I would say Google is almost hamstringing themselves a little bit by announcing this now as part of I.O. versus, say, in a more timely fast follow or even lead when Cursor was doing this months ago. I also I've used anti-gravity quite a bit, certainly was using it even more when Google first announced it after the Windsurf acquisition.

36:00Peter Diamandis:And I would say not super impressive. It was very buggy. I think 2.0, I haven't had a chance to use 2.0 yet, but hopefully it's a good deal stronger. But really, I don't know anyone who's doing their primary development work with anti-gravity at this point. The development is happening either with Claude Code or with Codex or maybe with Cursor. Anti-gravity, don't know anyone who's using it. Except every engineer at Google. Leapfrog. Except for Google, maybe. So Dave, you were trying to get on... Actually, even that's not true, though. So, I mean, it's been publicly reported that within Google DeepMind, they're all desperate to get cloud code access for everything.

36:39Yeah, we talked about that a couple of pods ago. Dave, you were playing with this actually during Google I.O. yesterday.

36:45Dave Blundin:Yeah, Tyler and I both installed it in real time as they were rolling it out, which may be not the smartest move in the world because there's 16 ,000 people behind us in the crowd probably all trying to do the same thing. So that was not a great first experience, but I don't blame Google for that. But this morning it worked fine and installed great. And I completely agree with Alex's assessment. It looks almost identical to the new cursor agent first Windows. I mean, like, I almost can't tell where I am. Am I in Cursor or am I in Antigravity? What they did do, which is a little more extreme than Cursor, is it completely replaces Antigravity 1.0.

37:25Dave Blundin:you can't even see the code anymore. And you have to go and launch the old thing if you want to actually edit code. So, you know, cursor didn't go quite that far, but it's really obvious where the puck is going. If you want to build things in the future, you're not even going to look at code. You're going to describe what you want, and you're going to debug at this much higher level of evals and functional comparisons. And, you know, I don't like where that button is, move it. And so I think, you know, in the future, nobody's going to want to go back to autocomplete code editor view. And so they leapt ahead and said, we're just going to eliminate that entirely.

37:59Dave Blundin:And if you really want to hack, we'll give you a way to get back to it. But we're going where the puck is going and not where it was. But it really is exactly catch up, like Alex said. Everybody's got the same, you know, it's codex and it's cloud code and anti-gravity. And they're just going to be leapfrogging each other. I'm just curious if there's going to be some new sort of breakout approach to this that's going to materialize. Alex, do you think there's anything in the future?

38:27Peter Diamandis:Well, code is clearly going away as a human endeavor. It's all being abstracted away by code agents that handle all code. And humans aren't maybe in the near term future trustworthy enough to even be allowed to write their own code. So I think that's one obvious arrow of time in this space. I think recursive self-improvement is another era of time. So not even old generation models are trustworthy enough. Maybe older models are trustworthy enough to rewrite themselves and generate newer, better models. But code's going away. I think that that's the obvious trend here.

38:59Dave Blundin:Well, I think also, Peter, to answer your question on the next paradigm, we've only had this paradigm for a couple months. So, you know, let's not settle in for a little bit. But no, clearly the next paradigm is exactly the Star Trek holodeck. which Alex has been saying for a while. So right now you're talking to it. It's building things for you. It's incredible, but it's not natively graphical and visual. And, you know, you're not moving things with your hands. So if you say, I want to move that button, I want to change this, I want to connect this to my email, you're not actually seeing the button move in real time.

39:32Dave Blundin:It's regenerating and then you see a new rendering. And in the future, it'll be a real-time graphical experience that's interacting in your comfortable physical space, kind of, you know, native human environment. And that's, you know, that next iteration is certainly within this calendar year. All right. Next up is Gemini Spark. In Google's, it's Google's, you know, take on OpenClaw, I think is the most obvious thing to say. It's a new always on AI agent that can write emails, create study guides, keep an eye out for, financial fees that you're being charged. It's Google's We Have Open Claw at Home moment.

40:14It's powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash. And it offers you a 24-7 operation. Let's take a listen to the conversation about Gemini Spark. Introducing Gemini Spark. Taking action on your behalf and under your direction. It runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud. and it's 24 seven. A task right off the bat. This is a pretty straightforward example, but it's so useful. Help me draft an email to the team, compile everything about our recent Gemini Live launches and wins from the last week. And what's amazing here is Spark will go through step by step. Look at all these steps, all the time it saves you going through.

41:01And again, work across the various skills and apps that you have. And what's really amazing is it'll break it down and also be able to generate files for you. So the first one here, this is a live RSVP tracker writing Google Sheets. You can see that it shows who's confirmed and who hasn't. What's amazing about this is it'll actually update because it's connected to Gmail. So when L. Thompson row 8 RSVPs, it'll update, which is pretty amazing. I mean, one of the things I find fascinating is it's the integration across all of the Google products. is very powerful, right? There's a point at which there's such a cost for not being inside the Google ecosystem that everybody defaults to it.

41:45Dave Blundin:Isn't that, this is the most ironic thing I've ever heard because people who are younger don't remember that Google only exists because the FTC stopped Microsoft from killing it. So Microsoft had just killed Netscape, taken total control of the browser and integrated it with the operating system and made it impossible to do anything on the Internet unless you went through Microsoft. And that triggered the FTC. Mike Hirschland came in. The whole lawsuit stopped Microsoft cold in its tracks, and they paid a$1 fine. I don't know if everyone remembers that. Hilarious outcome. But they had to unbundle.

42:22Dave Blundin:And that opened the door for Google to come into existence. Microsoft pseudo-competed with Bing, but they were prevented from competing aggressively and tying it back to the operating system. So here we are all these years later, and Google is coming out with this series of kind of exact copy of cursor, exact copy of, exact copy of, exact copy of, but it's perfectly integrated with these other, you saw on the other slide, what a dozen Google products that have over a billion users. A billion users out of this world population is a massive install base. So if you want OpenClaw, yeah, you can be over there.

43:04Dave Blundin:But if you want OpenClaw equivalent that works natively with Google Docs, Gmail, everything else, Android, everything else, your Google Pixel camera, then you have to use this. And so it's exactly history replaying itself. It's so ironic because they were so anti-Microsoft back then. The whole don't be evil motto was a direct attack on Microsoft, implying they were the big guys that were evil. So here we are years later. I'm not saying Google's evil in any way. I'm saying they're tying as their competitive advantage in the exact same way that Microsoft used to. Alex, what do you think about this compared to OpenClaw?

43:40Peter Diamandis:I think it's a lazy copycat product. I think it's obviously Google trying to take advantage of the resources that they have. So note, it's hosted in a GCP VM, not necessarily pushed all the way to the edge, although they have aspirations site to Gemini and Android Halo for that. But if you're Google and you see OpenClaw and you see Jensen out there saying OpenClaw is the next big chat GPT, really, what's the smallest, what's the minimum viable response that you could take? It's, okay, we're going to host GCP VMs with Gemini Flash that integrate together all of our products that run headlessly.

44:19Peter Diamandis:That's the sort of minimum viable strategic response. What I would have liked to see from Google DeepMind here was the maximum response. response. Show us the art of the possible. Show us what a next generation OpenClaw or Hermes competitor actually looks like. Create the benchmarks. Show us next generation capabilities. And they didn't deliver that here. Well, but Alex, I mean, just to be fair, they're delivering on a lot. It's not just one piece, right? It's a lot that is being deployed on Google I-O Day. But having said that, you know, I still love Skippy, which is an OpenClaw on top of my Mac studios.

44:59I love it because it's got a personality versus being sort of a generic, you know, agent that's ever present. I don't know if you can do that with Gemini Spark, but I think the personality side of these are critically important. Salim, any thoughts for you? Two thoughts.

45:15Dave Blundin:One is I agree with Alex, they really could have gone for a little bit more byte here. But on the other hand, when you can make agents generally available to the average Google user, there'll be hundreds of millions more people training up agents. And I think that's generally just good. OpenClausel has lots of room to be experimental, power user-oriented, very opinionated, doing the weird things like the natched camera stuff. But I think this is a very solid entry into that world to give people a taste of what an agent world could look like.

45:56Peter Diamandis:But it is boring. It's safe. It's playing it safe. Like, is it a safe entry? Yes, it's a safe entry. Will a lot of people maybe use this to clean up their Gmail inbox? Yeah, probably. But it's not pushing the frontier, which is really what I would have loved to have seen here. Yeah, I think that's your recurring theme on a lot of these, Alex. Is that true? I think, I mean, look, as accelerationist, yes, I'd love to see Frontier Labs pushing the frontier. And to the extent that this is an avatar of Google DeepMind and not just Google Corporate, I would love to see more Frontier coming out of the frontier.

46:31Dave, you want to close this out? Well, two quick thoughts. Go ahead, Slim. Sorry.

46:36Dave Blundin:Too quick to tell us. Like, there's something very powerful happening here because this is giving everybody an operating system for their lives because of the deep integration with all the other Google stuff. So I think the next productivity jump is going to come from persistence, and this will create a massive enabler across the board. And it's going to go back to the earlier comment. I just want to double down on that, which is it's going to train a lot of people on how to build agents and run agents. And I think that's going to then enable another class of things to come forward from that. Yeah, so there's no doubt that this is all fast follower, exactly the way you're characterizing it.

47:16Dave Blundin:On the other hand, you know, Peter, you love your Skippy. I love my agents that I set up too. But when you talk to somebody on the street and you say, hey, have you set up an OpenClaw or a Hermes? Overwhelmingly across the world, people say, no, I haven't done that. And that install and onboarding experience is just too much friction. So I wouldn't underestimate the power of default behavior. Now, over half the world uses Google. And if Google says, okay, Gemini Spark is going to be one click away from a Google search, it's completely integrated, massive fraction of the world is just going to click the button.

47:48Dave Blundin:And then their first experience with a personalized agent will be via that click. And so I don't think that anything can slow down Google because of their massive distribution advantage. And so they don't have to push the outer boundary. They can afford to be fast-follower. And I am equally disappointed, Alex. I'm not saying it. But from a strategy point of view, they don't need those risks. They just need to be as good one day later and integrated with Chrome, integrated with Google Search, integrated with Android, and they will win. I think Google's magic potion is making it user-friendly, making it easy, making it intuitive.

48:23And I think they're going to deliver with Gemini Spark on that particular promise. All right. Here's another part of Google's resurrection and dominance. It's agentic powering of AI search mode, AI everywhere. And remember the conversation we had, search is dead. Well, search is not dead. It's just been reinvented. Let's take a listen. I'm excited to announce we're launching a brand new intelligent search box. Before, the search box was a contained space, but now it's totally reimagined with AI. It expands with your curiosity. And as you ask, search helps you formulate your questions with AI-powered suggestions.

49:07This goes beyond autocomplete. It offers nuances that you might not have even thought to add. Now we're taking an exciting step toward this vision, where you'll be able to create and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks. right in search. Now, let's say you're apartment hunting. You can do a total brain dump of what you're looking for with all your criteria, like location and natural light and availability. And your agent will continuously scan the entire web across sites, social and forums. Persistent search here, right? So this is your agent. You know, whenever you've asked a question, it is going to persistently be looking for the latest and greatest.

49:46Yes, this new apartment and just became available. This product just got cheaper. You know, your wife loves this topic and, you know, here's a new product delivered to her. The other side though is that autocomplete function, I wonder where it's going to take us, right? You're going in asking or thinking about asking one question. And then of course, Google can sort of drift you into asking a different question you didn't intend to actually ask. A lot of interesting perturbations here.

50:14Dave Blundin:Oh my God, yeah. Well, think about a vacation plan where you're like, I really think I should go to Barbados and it autocompletes to Bermuda, and you're rerouted to a different hotel. The revenue power of that is astounding. Oh, that's evil. Opening Eye rolled out their first ads, and a lot of companies I know have adopted it, but it's very ham-fisted. It's like, here's some ads on the side. They're obviously ads. But the Google version of it has to preserve$200 billion of existing 90 % margin revenue. So they haven't quite figured out how they're going to surf that. But their power of the user decision making is like nothing we've ever seen before.

50:52So Google AdWords is now going to gently sort of drift you towards a different question that you weren't there asking. Absolutely. That would be amazing.

51:06Peter Diamandis:I mean, remember Google Instant as well, which also offered relatively fast suggestions. I don't think Google ended up directly monetizing that, but Google does, to Dave's point, have a long history of steering users toward more profitable queries. So I think that's probably quite likely. What I probably underline here is the shape of the rectangle changed after decades. How big a deal is that? After so many armchair commentators saying that Google was about to be disrupted by chat GPT with web search, turns out Google is able to self-disrupt and able to change the shape of that multi-decade old rectangle.

51:46Peter Diamandis:And it changed the shape in the direction of building AI modalities, AI search natively into their search experience, which I think many people were scared wasn't going to happen. and they did it in the end anyway.

51:59Dave Blundin:You know, guys, my very first venture investment ever was TripAdvisor, back when it was first starting. Oh, my God. And the big quandary at TripAdvisor was, how are we going to have completely unbiased, accurate reviews and still get paid by the hotels? We need to make money somehow. How is this going to work? And it turned out that just by sorting the list, you know, the human default behavior is so dominant that they'll go overwhelmingly. Laziness. You mean laziness is so dominant? Yeah, you know, but laziness, but we're buried in decisions now. So many things coming at us from so many different directions that we have to be lazy.

52:35Dave Blundin:Like only Alex could actually study every single pathway and make an optimal choice. Everyone else, you just have to fall into the default buckets once in a while. And so, you know, 80 % of people will click on one of the first two or three hotels. So you can have perfectly accurate reviews and just resort the list. So the ones that are paying, you're at the top. And then you have your cake and eat it too. So I think that default behavior will hugely benefit Google because they will steer the users, but they don't have to be super overt. And, you know, they're not going to misguide you into some fraudulent product.

53:07Dave Blundin:They're allergic to that like crazy. But people will still follow the default suggestions from Gemini, and then Google will collect the revenue from whoever is willing to pay. Salim? I just love the fact that they have the courage to risk disrupting their own business. I think that's it's such a hard thing organizationally to do. And I give them full props for going after it. Yeah. And for everybody, you know, everybody listening to this, you know, our goal here is to give you an overview of what Google has just done. It's so dominant in the planet. It does steer a lot of humanity's sort of abilities.

53:45So I hope folks are enjoying this summary. Please dive into these. You know, your mindset of curiosity is your single greatest tool. So go and play with these things. When you finish listening to this podcast, go and jump onto Google and play with the new AI search or its capabilities.

54:02Peter Diamandis:One more note, Peter, if I may, just on Google's self-disruption via search. I think there's this misconception out there that the main obstacle to Google self-disrupting their search with so-called modern AI was somehow on the business side or the business risk or the advertising side. I think actually the main obstacle was more technical, that Google engineers for a couple of years there were concerned that there wasn't a cost-effective way or a time-effective way to squeeze generative models into the very narrow and latency-sensitive and cost-sensitive parameters of just powering a search, that the models were too expensive and too slow to yield search results that would be competitive.

54:44Peter Diamandis:And this is, I suspect, one of the reasons why you see going back to Gemini 3.5 Flash emphasizing throughput so much. Yes. It's reflecting Google's own internal dogfooding needs of having ultra high throughput models that they could use to power search and some of their own internal applications that maybe OpenAI and Anthropic aren't feeling that demand function as much. Makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense. All right. Next subject is Google is launching a universal cart that users can add products to from YouTube, from search, from Gemini, from Gmail. Google says this intelligent shopping cart works across a multitude of different merchants from Nike and Target to Walmart to Shopify.

55:26So you could literally add a product when you're searching on a Nike site or a Target site and then have it monitored and bought at the same time. Let's take a look. You know, again, this is part of Google's incredible revenue engine. Okay.

55:44Dave Blundin:I am excited to announce the Universal Cart, a truly intelligent shopping cart. It works across merchants and across services. You'll be able to add things to your cart when you're browsing search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube, or even reading your Gmail. The moment you add a product, your card goes to work for you in the background. It finds deals, looks at price drops, gives you insights on the price history, and alerts you when something comes back in stock. So, reinventing the shopping experience. I've got some comments I'd like to hear from you guys first. Elephants in the room.

56:24Elephants in the room. Yes, Alex.

56:26Peter Diamandis:The elephant is Amazon. So I look at every announcement relating to shopping, quote unquote, from Google through the lens of how are they going to compete with Amazon for retail e-shopping? And whether it's trying to commodify, create sort of virtual storefronts for individual retail vendors, whether it's crawling third party e-commerce websites and assembling virtual pages and now universal carts. This is all through the lens of how they're going to compete with Amazon. So I think the elephant in the room here is, is Amazon even going to contemplate going anywhere near complying or adopting Google standards?

57:04Peter Diamandis:My guess is not. Well, you know, the follow on here, we're going to be seeing in a few moments the reinvention of Google Glass where you've got imaging capability. And we're going to see probably the next invention of shopping where shopping is always on. wherever you're looking and you see something and your AI agent realizes, oh, I'm focusing on Alex's beautiful orchid in the background, which is, I mean, is that orchid real, Alex? I just need to ask. I thought, Peter, you said reality was cooked. So you tell me. Okay. Literally, when I look at something, my AI agent will say, oh, you're focusing on that.

57:39Do you want to purchase it? Or as you're walking through the day, right? Instead of shopping becoming sort of a something you do for an instant of time. It's a continuous function. And Universal Cart is aggregating all the things and then probably at the end of the day saying, hey, do you want to purchase that? Just say yes. We're going to be seeing this is an early step, but not the full instantiation of reinventing shopping. Salim, you were going to say? Yeah.

58:04Dave Blundin:So today we go from human to website to shopping cart to checkout, right? And tomorrow we're going to go from intent to agent to transaction. And I think every CMO in the world going forward is going to be asking, how do I convince 100 million agents to choose my product? They're going to have to market to the agents, right? And so I think this is powerful. I mean, look, Google helped create a trillion-dollar company by helping people do search. Somebody's going to create a trillion-dollar company by helping agents buy. But are you ever going to market to an agent? I mean, my agent knows what I want, knows my genetics, knows my taste from everything else.

58:45It may just be buying stuff for me all the time that could be returnable, sort of surprise and delight. Something shows up on the front doorstep. Oh, I thought you'd like this. Here it is. If you don't want, I'll have it picked up and returned. And you will definitely go to that.

58:58Dave Blundin:The disruption to e-commerce is not the better shopping. It's getting rid of shopping. Yes. There's this ambient experience where, hey, your shoes look a bit dirty from the camera I looked at from your doorway camera. I'm sipping you new shoes. You know, it would be that kind of thing. Dave? I think it's just amazingly shocking the degree to which the big guys don't care anymore about consumer shopping. Because Amazon was nothing but consumer shopping originally. And, you know, built their entire empire on consumer shopping. and then added AWS. AWS is so much bigger at Amazon now than the entire Amazon we know, you know, all of the shopping.

59:40Dave Blundin:And so Google was already competing with that side of Amazon with, you know, GCP versus AWS. And so they're already in this battle royale over compute and data centers and enterprise use and everything. And so Google had already tried to compete in retail with Frugal. Remember Frugal? Of course. A long time ago. Yeah.

59:59Peter Diamandis:Frugal right before shopping.

1:00:01Dave Blundin:yet another rebrand. Yeah. So, I think that this is another attempt to take Amazon head-on on the shopping side, but I think AI is a big game changer. But it doesn't matter too much whether Amazon defends its turf or whether Google encroaches and wins. At the end of the day, the battle on the cloud and the back end is so much bigger, and it's already raging. So this is kind of cool. I think it's just the next stage of this trillion-dollar retail battle that we'll rage on for a while. All right. Let's jump into conversation about Gemini app and Notebook LM. Here's Josh Woodward, who heads Gemini.

1:00:44I think we're going to get Josh on the pod here. We'll talk to him about what he's up to. Let's take a listen. More than 900 million users are coming to the Gemini app every month. Just on its own, Notebook LM has now been used to create more than 1.5 billion notebooks, podcasts, slide decks, and more. It's now available in more than 230 countries and over 70 languages. It now opens up immediately and in line. And soon you'll be able to pick a regional dialect that resonates with you. You've got a right good mix of different accents knocking about like this one from Liverpool.

1:01:27Gemini Omni is coming right into the Gemini app. Let's look how this plays out in the real world. I want you to meet Sashu. She is working on a new song and she wants to create a quick video teaser. So she shares the raw video. She adds some reference visuals to it. Let's take a look at what it looks like.

1:01:53The third update today is about how agents are coming to Gemini. One of our newest out-of-the-box agents called the Daily Brief. It's a personalized digest that's designed to be your first stop every morning. Here's how it works. You can see here that it's synthesizing information from across my inbox. And with this travel info, I can just take the next step right in line. So this is an integration story. This is Google integrating across all of its capabilities and making it so magical that you can't afford not to be in the Google ecosystem. Dave, what do you think about this?

1:02:29Dave Blundin:Yeah, it's amazing when you got one guy on stage demonstrating here we can build an entire operating system in real time. Let's go. I'm consuming a trillion tokens right now building. And nobody gets it, right? Nobody can relate to building an operating system. Then Josh gets up there and says, here's a real human musician. And here's her trying to portray herself to her fan base. The crowd goes crazy. And it just shows you the human aspect of this is so dominant, even in Google, even within the empire. The human aspect of it is so dominant in people's minds. And it doesn't come through on the video cast when 20 ,000 people see Josh present something and they go, wow, oh my God, I can totally, and the vibe is contagious across the whole crowd.

1:03:14Dave Blundin:And it just, it's hard to capture that in a video clip, but it's, yeah, it's, it's just remarkable. It's going to unleash so much creativity and it's such an exciting time. And I wish, you know, I wish that was the only vibe, you know, that everyone could just capture and then hold and bottle that in. But this, just a great moment. Alex, your take.

1:03:33Peter Diamandis:Why is Google still branding Notebook LM as Notebook LM? It should have been folded directly into Gemini or maybe Google Workspace or something else. Why does this still have an independent brand? I don't understand it.

1:03:46Dave Blundin:Well, look at all the other, it's like Spark and Flash and anti-gravity and like all this is really fragmented all over the map,

1:03:52Peter Diamandis:like divisional kind of branding. Google has this reputation for better or for worse of launching lots of products and having a culture where product managers get promotions for launching but not maintaining products. I'd really love, under the spirit of more wood behind fewer arrows, to see all of this functionality just unified in a way that gets sustained.

1:04:13Dave Blundin:Yeah, especially because AI is such a unifying force. You can put one voice and interface on top of all this mess. And Google's branding originally was so good. It was so simple. It was so good. Speaking directly to... Clean and colorful and humanistic and friendly and all of that.

1:04:33Peter Diamandis:Speaking directly to Josh and the Google team, please just unify all of these offerings and maintain them. Don't keep launching 10 different products and product names that we'll forget about a few months from now. Just please unify all of them and maintain them. The idea of a daily brief, I love it. Skip, it gives me a daily brief. This is a beautiful integration here. But being able to know what you're doing, when you're doing it, what your intention is, and giving you updates all the time on your flight. You know, there's a new flight that's available. Now it's five times cheaper or whatever the case might be.

1:05:08And the weather is going to be hotter than expected. So make sure to, you know, to pack different. That level of overlay intelligence is going to be magical, right? It is.

1:05:20Peter Diamandis:But at the same time, remember Google Reader, Google's RSS reader that Google abandoned despite having a rabid user base, myself included. I know Google really wants to own the news feed. That much is obvious. But please just maintain it. OK.

1:05:37Dave Blundin:Salim. So two thoughts. One is I've always thought about Notebook LM, for Alex's earlier comments, as this weird thing sitting out there because it incorporates presentation and learning and interaction that kind of does, you know, what's the difference between doing this and the Gemini app and doing it in Spark? I mean, people are going to create a lot of confusion around this. The point that Alex made, I just want to double down on, which is when in any big company, we had this at Yahoo as well, you're rewarded for getting something out there, But then you've got a strategic project manager looking across resource allocation about 10 different projects.

1:06:15Dave Blundin:And so you get a peanut butter problem where you're very thin across all the different projects. You don't iterate very well. One of the few companies that iterates very well is Apple. They will relentlessly iterate on their products. And most other companies go too thin. On a small number of products. Yeah. Now, and they go very, there's a whole thing written by Brad Garling, it's called the peanut butter manifesto when I was at Yahoo that mirrors this whole challenge of how do you navigate this in a limited scene? Because they're not run as each individual team doing startups with KPIs of their own and targets, et cetera.

1:06:53Dave Blundin:They're run across in hierarchical structures in many cases, and you suffer a lot from that. All right. Google's new product called Audio Glasses. We heard earlier about their partnership with Xreal. Here's a partnership with Samsung and a couple of different glass manufacturers. Let's take a look and how is this going to impact our lives? Two videos to show, then we'll discuss them. The next big milestone for Android XR is intelligent eyewear. Today, I'm excited to announce that our first audio glasses will arrive this fall. They are designed to give you all-day help with Gemini that is spoken into your ear privately rather than shown on a display.

1:07:37Dave Blundin:And these glasses let you stay hands-free and heads-up for things like listening to music, taking photos, making calls, or tapping into your phone apps, all without reaching for your pocket. All right, video number two from Samsung. At Samsung, our vision is to enrich people's lives and help shape how we live tomorrow. In close partnership with Google, we're introducing intelligent eyewear that impowers you to connect to the world with confidence. Built with Samsung's precise engineering and craftsmanship, we're merging form, function, and helpful intelligence to create something you'll want to wear.

1:08:18Dave Blundin:In eyewear, every millimeter counts. Today, we're thrilled to share a first look at the upcoming styles co-created with our eyewear partners, Orby Parker and Gentle Monster. All right, the elephant in the room here, it's got forward-looking cameras, but you're not seeing words or images on the screen. You're being spoken to by your AI. Interestingly enough, I think that being present in life has just been cooked as well. I mean, imagine you're walking around and you're just having you're not talking to your wife, your girlfriend, your kids. You're just having the agent whispering to you all the time.

1:08:58Salim, what do you make of this?

1:09:02Dave Blundin:So a bunch of things. I was really disappointed in that there's no visual on the on the screen. I mean, doing the audio is might be in Alex's words very mid. But we're moving to that point where human computer interaction becomes continuous and becomes an ambient layer that's just ongoing. And I think that is the bigger story here because that will kind of just continue to play out as we merge with technology. Already we pick up our phones 80 ,000 times a day. This just continues that in a very kind of unnoticeable way. The form factor is very workable.

1:09:39Peter Diamandis:Google should have owned smart glasses. Instead, Meta is running away with this space. Apple is also playing catch-up. Where was Google? Google had, I was one of the earliest users of Google Glass. Remember that? Yes, the glass holes out there in the world. Did you get punched? I did not, fortunately, but they had a battery life of like five minutes, and they self-bricked through operating system updates. It was, I think even Google would recognize it was prematurely released. Google could have kept iterating to this earlier point about doubling down. Google could have kept iterating on smart glasses from the Google Glass era, and they didn't.

1:10:16Peter Diamandis:They basically abandoned Google Glasses to enterprise and then abandoned them completely. And now this is, I think, represents a complete reset, except without all of the conveniences that Google Glass had. Meanwhile, Meta was iterating away, spending billions of dollars, sure, but iterating away at smart glasses. And now Meta has the lead in the space, not Apple and not Google. So, I would love to see a very competitive smart glass market between Meta, Google, and Apple. But I really would like to see Google XR, in particular Android XR, stepping it up a notch and shipping much more quickly. Right now, Meta is running away with the space.

1:10:52Peter Diamandis:Dave, what do you think, pal?

1:10:54Dave Blundin:Well, I mean, this is where society is going to have a huge rift. Because, you know, the punching in the face was a very real thing last time Google went down this path. and they are trying to own the consumer and be a consumer-friendly brand. But if they roll out a product where half of society is walking around recording everything all day long and the other half is offended by that, then that's going to be a major, major problem. And they're stuck. They want to own this space. They have the technology to do it. People are going to want to talk to their Skippy, their agent, all day long. They're not going to want to lose touch with it.

1:11:29Dave Blundin:So this is a great way to stay in touch with your kind of agentic world that's working for you behind the scenes. So I'm very eager to use it. I'm also not super eager to get punched in the face. You know, there were three commencement addresses this week, including Eric Schmitz in Arizona, where as soon as the commencement speaker said AI, the whole crowd went, boo. And so, I mean, if you're not aware that that's what's going on, and it's very easy to live in your echo chamber, especially here in Silicon Valley or in Cambridge, But you got to walk around Mississippi or walk around Nebraska to really understand how big a deal this is going to be.

1:12:03Dave Blundin:So I think the glasses are going to be a huge forcing function in this inevitable conflict. Really important points. Audio, glasses, hello, oxymoron.

1:12:13Peter Diamandis:Well, audio, visual, oxymoron, no. They go together very well. But the audio feedback layer, I think it was a, you know, they want to provide a product that actually works consistently. and I think probably the imaging up on AR glasses is still kind of weak. The version of the metaglasses I've tried are okay, but it's still a far way off from being able to turn on an ambient AR layer that's convincing and compelling. The brightness isn't there. You've got to look at it in the right – but audio, having your AI being able to say, oh, okay, I know you were shopping for that. Do you like that one?

1:12:52And I'll order it for you right now. or importantly, I don't need to, you know, when I see Alex approaching me and I've forgotten his name and he's coming at me and the glasses can say, oh, you know, that's Alex Wiesner Gross. You know, he's got an IQ of 100 ,000. You know, that should be enough. I'll never forget your name, Peter, for the record. Thank you. I appreciate that. Nor I yours, my friend. But I think the The audio interface is a smart move to make it clean and compelling and consistent and something that you can interface with on a regular basis. I am concerned about this issue of, you know, you guys all have this, right?

1:13:35You're with your family or with friends and something pops up on your phone and you focus your attention to your phone. you know, the loss of presence in life can be really costful, really cost.

1:13:49Dave Blundin:Yeah, it really can. And also, I think the, you know, the cameras are always on, they're very low battery consumption. So you can run the cameras continuously. And it's just seeing everything you see, and then talking to you about what you're looking at. So that's Alex, that's Salim. But if you really want to display, you know, it can talk to your phone, and you can look on on your phone to see anything it wants to tell you there. So it's all integrated through Bluetooth anyway. But I think the consumer would rather have the longer battery life and not have to worry about it dying every hour, like Alex was saying.

1:14:18Dave Blundin:So this is a good temporary stepping stone. And like you said, Peter, putting the display in front of your eyes. If you think being not present in the moment is bad with this in your ear, imagine when it's flashing between you and your wife, flashing images on your... This is a good product design. Yeah, I know that, Alex, we're going to lose you in a moment, but I wanted to have the last two segments with you still with us. Let's jump into Demis' presentation on Gemini for Science. I'm excited to announce Gemini for Science, which brings together powerful AI tools to help accelerate research.

1:14:57Gemini can already assist in solving complex problems, but our new lab prototypes streamline daily scientific tasks. whether it's staying on top of newly published papers, transforming research goals into usable code, or generating new hypotheses. Another powerful tool for science is simulation.

1:15:17Peter Diamandis:AI simulations are going to be critical for understanding and predicting dynamic systems that are simply too complex to model directly today. Our state-of-the-art Weather Next models can predict hurricane paths faster and more accurately than traditional systems. At Isomorphic Labs, we're modeling molecular interactions to massively accelerate the development of new medicines, supported by leading industry partners. We're now in preclinical stage with multiple projects, including potential treatments for immune disorders and cancer. When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.

1:15:55Standing in the foothills of the singularity. I love that line. I wonder where Demis got that line. That's such a nice line. that. You've said that before, Alex. That's a nice line. Thanks, Demis. Alex, what's your take on this? I think it's wonderful.

1:16:08Peter Diamandis:I'm broadly supportive of what Sir Demis is doing for DeepMind in science. I think it represents DeepMind at its best when it's challenging what Demis calls root node problems like fusion or like protein folding. I think it's wonderful. I don't think Google as a business has deeply vested interest in monetizing this. I think this is more for the public benefit from Google's perspective. But I have portfolio companies, companies that I founded that work very closely with Google on issues and technologies relating to this. And I'm broadly super supportive of DeepMind pushing these out to the public.

1:16:54Peter Diamandis:I think it's very important. And they've made so many interesting, I would call them innovations relating to meta science. How do you produce more science at the algorithmic level and hope to see much more from them in the future on this front? Amazing. Alex, listen, thank you for joining us on this segment. I know you need to jump. Love you as always. Thank you for your brilliance. Appreciate you, pal. Thank you, Peter. Thanks. Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is impacting every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we do our business.

1:17:26But one of the most important things that AI can deliver to us is health. And one of the things I think about when shooting for 100, 120 is, am I going to have the cognitive health to be able to think clearly and keep my wits about me for the next 50 years? I'm joined here today by Dr. Don Musalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a member of my Fountain Life medical team. Don, a pleasure. So, Don, talk to me about brain health.

1:17:52Dave Blundin:Brain health, you know, you're right. This is the number one concern people coming into Fountain Life have is, will I remember

1:17:59Peter Diamandis:the name of my child and the face of my loved one? 45 % of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age. But over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly, and optimizing sleep.

1:18:21Dave Blundin:People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46 % of those individuals. That's a powerful number. That's amazing. You know, one of the things I love about Fountain is we're constantly searching the world for the most advanced therapeutics and bringing them to our members. So for me and all of you, I hope that you appreciate the fact that you can become the CEO of your own health. you can make sure that you've got the cognitive clarity for the next 50 years. Come and check it out. Fountainlife.com slash Peter to learn more and become the CEO of your health.

1:18:57Now back to the episode. All right. One more story from Google IO. This one is very personal. We just announced the$2 million build with Gemini XPRIZE. Let's take a listen and then I'll provide some detail about it. The ultimate platform to make an impact. We are officially launching the Build with Gemini XPRIZE hackathon. This global hackathon is going to offer up$2 million in prizes for builders who create apps that solve actual real-world challenges. And the premise is simple. Pick a problem worth solving, Build with Gemini, and let's all try to positively impact the lives of a billion people.

1:19:39To build at that scale, you're going to need some serious power. So a call out to all hackers, all builders out there. You know, we've launched two XPRIZES in the last couple of months. The Future Vision XPRIZE asking people to create a film trailer and a film treatment for the movie you'd love to see that shows a hopeful, compelling, abundant vision of the future. That XPRIZE is meant to help shape people's view of the future and actually to help shape agents' view of the future so they are positive and supportive and aligned with humans. This is one, you know, we've talked about on this pod all the time that the future is one of entrepreneurship.

1:20:17Instead of getting a degree to go get a job, instead find a passion, find a problem and build on it. So I want to say thank you to Google for funding this. They put up$3 million, two for the prize purse, a million for operations. And again, if you want to compete, go to GeminiXPrize.com. You're going to look for a problem that impacts 100 ,000 people or more. And then you've got basically 90 days to build your product using AI. And again, very famously, you're going to describe what you want the product to do, the market, how you want to market it in English. The agent's going to build your website, your interfaces.

1:21:00And the team that's able to build it, market it and scale revenue the most in 90 days wins this XPRIZE, teaching people to fish instead of giving them fish. That's the goal here. Salim, any thoughts?

1:21:14Dave Blundin:Very exciting. It reminds me of the there was a problem as a medical problem called Lazy Eye and there was no cure for it. And then a team built an app which had a gamification system that solved crazy. You got Lazy Eye. So I think there's all sorts of things as we take obscure problems that hit a reasonable number of people and really go after it. Very, very excited. We've seen the incredible outcome when you put open innovation in the seeds ecosystems like this throughout the history of XPRIZE. So couldn't be prouder. Yeah, I'm super, super pumped. And, you know, full disclosure, both Salim and Dave are on my board at XPRIZE Foundation.

1:21:54Dave?

1:21:56Dave Blundin:You know, I think I'm excited. I think this is the highest calling for XPRIZE yet. Being involved with XPRIZE, I've been incredibly proud of it for a decade now. But now, with Google behind it, also OpenAI has a$100 billion charity now, and they need to put that money to work as well. And so all these mega-funded companies are suddenly very, very interested in turning AI toward good, which is not an easy problem. And XPRIZE is really, really good at taking very hard problems and making them actionable. and so unleash that capital in ways that actually benefit humanity. You look at the oil cleanup XPRIZE and the impact that's had and kicking off of all of the space activity that we have via XPRIZE.

1:22:36Dave Blundin:So this is just the next chapter, but it's the biggest chapter by far. I love it. And a reminder, everybody watching and listening, if you want to be there at our Moonshot gathering on September 25th, go to moonshots.com. We're going to be awarding both the Gemini XPRIZE as well as the Future Vision XPRIZE on that day. We're going to have the five finalists, the five creators with the five top film trailers and the five finalists with the Gemini X Prize who've created the most revenue. They'll be there pitching. And if you're in the room, you're going to be helping to vote on who the winner is.

1:23:10So, again, September 25th, go to moonshots.com to join the Moonshot mates and be there with us at the Moonshot gathering. All right. I see Andrew Feldman has entered the room. Andrew, a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for having me on your show. Appreciate it. Of course, by way of introduction, Andrew is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebrus, a pioneering wafer scale computing dedicated to accelerating AI training and inference. Cerebrus just raised$5.5 billion. I should say you just raised$5.5 billion, the biggest U.S. IPO since Uber in 2019, up 68 % and market cap of$95 billion. Quite the coming out party, Andrew.

1:23:51It felt good. You had to work for it, too. Super exciting for the team. We were able to bring a portion of the organization and their families and to share it. I mean, my parents were there and my wife and my stepdaughter. We made it into a family event, and it was really something special. Amazing. Generational wealth for everybody in your organization. Extraordinary. And we'll come to that story in just a moment. A little bit more in AI news before we turn to Cerebrus and Chips. A big story. Andrew Kaparthi joins Anthropic. Andre is an extraordinary individual. You know, he's joined the pre-training team at Anthropic, and he'll start a new initiative focused on using Claude to accelerate Claude's own pre-training research.

1:24:48You know, his announcement, he said, The next few years at the frontier of LLM will be especially formative. And that's where he wants to be. Gavarthi has a stellar resume in AI. He was the co-founder of OpenAI. He left in 2017 to run full self-driving for Elon at Tesla. He returned to OpenAI in 2023 and 2024. And then he founded Eureka Labs. Let's take a quick listen to Andre on a podcast called No Priors. This is a conversation he had before the announcement. And so listen up when he's doing a shout out to call out to which Frontier Lab wants to hire me.

1:25:24Dave Blundin:And they're working on what's coming down the line. And I think if you're outside of that Frontier Lab, your judgment fundamentally will start to drift because you're not part of the, you know, what's coming down the line. And so I feel like my judgment will inevitably start to drift as well. And I won't actually have an understanding of how these systems actually work under the hood. That's an opaque system. I won't have a good understanding of how it's going to develop and et cetera. And so I do think that in that sense, I agree and something I'm nervous about.

1:25:45Peter Diamandis:I think it's worth basically being in touch with what's actually happening and actually being in the frontier lab. And if some of the frontier labs would have me come for some amount of time and do really good work for them, and then maybe come in and out. Guys, he's looking for a job. This is super exciting. Then I think that's maybe a good setup because I kind of feel like it's kind of, maybe there's like one way to actually be connected to what's actually happening, but also not feel like you're necessarily fully controlled by those entities.

1:26:07Dave Blundin:So I think, honestly, in my mind, Noam can probably do extremely good work at OAI, but also I think his most impactful work could very well be outside of OpenAI.

1:26:14Peter Diamandis:No, that's a call to be an independent researcher. That was Andre on five cups of coffee. His quote that he put out on X, I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and remain deeply passionate about education. All right, Dave, your take.

1:26:37Dave Blundin:Andrew, he was calling to you. That was the moment he was saying, Cerebras, I need your compute. Please call me. I hate you guys. He does. Everybody does, actually. So Andre came out with that auto research repo a couple months ago and I installed it. It's been auto researching on my cloud for a while now, but it desperately wants much, much more compute. And it doesn't need mega models. You know, it can run on lean, highly focused models. But I think he finally realized that every other OpenAI co-founder has either raised billions and billions of dollars or is at a foundation lab. And he's the only guy who doesn't have access to the big machine.

1:27:16Dave Blundin:And it's just, he can't just sit there posting on Git anymore. He has to be part of one of these big machines because we're on the cusp of the singularity and you can't miss it by being outside of the big game. Salim, any thoughts? I thought his point was well taken that he, where he said that if you're not in the foundation, in the labs, you're missing out, things are moving past you. And so he's trying to beat the cutting in and knowledge. I just, I think there's, it's also notable he would have had his choices to where to go. And I think it's very interesting that he joined Anthropoc. Really interesting.

1:27:49And it's interesting that this was announced on the same day as Google I.O., a little bit of marketing strategy, perhaps. Andrew, what do you take about, what's your take on this? Look, he is sort of one of the most important and prolific thinkers in the space, Right. And not just, I think, as reflected in what he's built, but in reflected in sort of how he's taught the community. And I think that's interesting. I think his point that there are a small number of frontier labs that are sufficiently far ahead that if you're not with them, you're not on the frontier probably applies to hardware, too.

1:28:30Mm-hmm. Right? That if you're not building hardware for, engaged with, at a fundamental level, one of the three labs, the three most important labs, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, you are not seeing what they're thinking. Mm-hmm. And just like your ideas will drift if you're a model maker, your hardware will drift from what they need as well. And I thought that that was really sort of, I applied that to our domain. And I think he has just an extraordinary track record for useful stuff he's built. Extraordinary.

1:29:15Dave Blundin:Yeah. And he's also just a super, super ethical guy and known for it. So, he's a talent attractor. You know, a lot of people here in the Valley want to work for the most ethical organization that they can navigate to. And he's got that aura just all over, as do you, Andrew, actually, as do Cerebris, where we are right now. Well, speaking about ethical organizations, let's jump into the conversation about OpenAI versus Elon. Okay. All right. How's that for a transition, guys? Yeah, that's a stretch. Yeah, you had to work for that one. I did. I took advantage of Dave's point. So the jury rules against Elon Musk in the open AI lawsuit.

1:29:58So federal jury unanimously rejected Elon's lawsuit in just two hours of deliberation. Wow. Jurors ruled that Musk waited too long to sue outside the statute of limitations for his claims. Elon's legal team, of course, is going to appeal. So I don't know what to say other than I would love this story to sort of not cloud the entire AI data center conversations that we're having.

1:30:30Dave Blundin:Well, very curious, Andrew, you know, OpenAI, you have a very close relationship with OpenAI. Did you have a lot of skin in the game in this outcome? It's only going to be good news for Cerebris, but was it relevant? I think this was a giant distraction. Billionaires in pissing matches interest me not at all. I think these are two of the most important thinkers of our generation. I think what Elon has built is breathtaking. I've met him, had dinner together. whether he's a polymath, he's a brilliant thinker. What Sam has built, sort of one of the fastest growing companies in the history of capitalism.

1:31:15But some of his ideas also in the invention of the safe at Y Combinator, these were enormously meaningful in the structure of Silicon Valley. I think everybody loses when they battle. I think, you know, I want Elon building cool shit. I want Sam building cool shit. And I don't want to waste time or read about sort of disagreements. I just want sort of these guys doing what they're the best in the world at, which is building stuff. Well said, Andrew. Well said.

1:31:48Dave Blundin:I'm just really angry it got to this point. Surely they could have looked at it and gone, the statute of limitations has expired. You just don't even bother. I mean, this is very upsetting. How much angst and bullshit time to Andrews when it was spent on this? And they could have been building. How much more could they have done? Really good point. I mean, the ruling they made was obvious from the beginning if they were ruling based on the timing. But this is the reason Elon's going to appeal because he says that's not the point. I looked into this. I looked into this and the appeal will very, very likely fail because it's a factual based decision and the courts rarely overturn those.

1:32:34Dave Blundin:Well, I think to Andrew's point, though, you know, Dennis said earlier in this podcast that we're standing in the foothills of the singularity. An appeal is a slow, long. It's going to be irrelevant in the timeline that really matters, I think. All right. Let's jump into part of the innermost loop, chips. And here we are, Andrew, Cerebrus record IPO, closes up 68 percent market cap,$95 billion. And Dave, you're in the Cerebrus offices this morning, aren't you? I am. I am. I love the energy. You know, it's such a rare, I think all of America is driven by this moment. You know, people building toward this event.

1:33:11Dave Blundin:And Andrew's journey was longer and harder than a lot. And to actually get there, you know, it's so hard. Because I pushed that button about, you know, 1 % of the size of Cerebrus, but I still pushed that same button on the NASDAQ. And I didn't realize until that picture has been hanging on my wall for years now. And it's like a lifetime achievement, kind of like a Nobel Prize or an Olympic gold medal, where you carry it for the rest of your life. And so, so few people get to experience that. So I couldn't resist the opportunity. I was only a few miles away anyway. I couldn't resist the opportunity to come here and just feel the aura of it's still settling in here, clearly, Andrew.

1:33:50Dave Blundin:Is that the way it feels? Yeah. And you're always welcome to come on by. Thanks. and enjoy the mojo that we've got going here. I mean, we try and create an environment where exceptional people can do extraordinary work. Andrew, you and I met at the Citibank event six months ago. I was there giving the dinner keynote on longevity. I remember. I wish I had only had a chance to go on your friends and family round before you had this epic, epic release. If you don't mind, tell all of our listeners and viewers here, a little bit of the backstory, the founding story behind Cerebris. What was the moment where you said, this needs to exist?

1:34:30And you took a very different route than NVIDIA and other chip manufacturers. We did. The founders had all worked together at my previous startup. And AMD bought that in 2012. And by 2015, we'd wandered off a little bit and we started meeting and we saw AI on the horizon. And what we knew was that this new workload would eat through extraordinary amounts of compute. And we made two really big bets. We made a bet that said, like graphics produced the GPU, and like mobile compute supported the development of the ARM processor, that this technology, this work, would be big enough to require dedicated silicon.

1:35:23And the second bet we made was that the right strategy wasn't to build a derivative of the GPU. You needed to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you needed to do something fundamentally different. And these were enormously contrarian bets at the time, and both proved to be dead right. And from that foundation, we continued the innovative thinking, and we said, what AI is going to need is memory bandwidth. That's the sort of speed with which you can move data from memory to compute. And the way to innovate on that dimension is to use a different type of memory than everybody else uses. We have two types of memory.

1:36:10We have memory that can store a lot that's slow, and we call that DRAM or HBM. And we have memory that is fast, but can't store very much per square millimeter. And so, what we hypothesized was that if we could build a chip the size of a dinner plate, a chip sort of 58 times larger than any chip ever built before, we could stuff it to the gills with SRAM, thereby overcoming its weakness in not being able to store very much per square millimeter and benefit from its strength. That proved to be a very difficult problem to tackle. But when we got it, it proved to be right. We are somewhere between 15 and 20 times faster than the GPU on any inference problem.

1:37:04And so, the challenge along the way was that nobody had ever built a chip this big. Not once in the 75-year history of the computer industry. Yeah, they kept slicing them thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller. That's right. And that even those on the Mount Rushmore of our industry, people like Gene Amdahl, had failed, crashed and burned. And interestingly, even after we solved this problem, we had people come and visit our labs and then try and build it, and they also failed. And so, what it took was years of perseverance and innovation, and all the credit goes to the engineering team, Gary and Sean and Michael and JP and the team we had.

1:37:49We failed for years. And in August of 2019, we announced we'd solved this problem that had been unsolved forever. And we thought everybody would rush to our door. And the world didn't care one bit. Why? The world was utterly indifferent. In the first generation, I think we sold 12 systems. And in the second generation, we sold 300, 350. And in the third generation, we're selling many, many thousands. And so, what happened was, we solved this problem, and we're way ahead of the market. And it wasn't until 2024, late 2024, early 2025, that the models got fast enough, and the models got smart enough, that people wanted to use inference everywhere.

1:38:42And that's what happened. And so, there we were with the fastest inference machines on Earth. by orders of magnitude, and suddenly, people wanted to use AI. The way we use AI is with inference. We were just crushed with demand. Then in December of 2025, we signed a deal with OpenAI north of$20 billion over several years, one of the largest deals ever signed in Silicon Valley. In March, we signed a term sheet with AWS for deployment in their data centers. and business has been pretty good since. Well, congratulations. Why don't you just take a second and welcome Alex back. Alex, good to have you back.

1:39:26Good to be back. Amazing to meet you, Andrew.

1:39:29Peter Diamandis:How are you going, Alex?

1:39:30Dave Blundin:Doing well. I wanted to ask you, Andrew, I was talking to Valavan yesterday, your chief product architect, brilliant guy in Toronto. Awesome, awesome friend. But I didn't realize that the company had a whole history as a training side company. Inference is now 80%, 90 % of the market. And moving a huge amount of data from SRAM through the processing massively benefits on the inference side. But did you see that coming in the initial design? I don't think a lot of the research people even knew that inference would be so dominant. I think that we got many, many bets wrong. And I think any CEO who looks back over a decade that moved as quickly as ours and says they got it all right is probably not a guy you want at your birthday party.

1:40:20We got an enormous amount wrong. But one of the things we got right was an understanding that we make AI with training and we use it with inference. And if AI is going to be smart and if it's going to be useful, you need to have an inference business. That bit we saw early. The real problem between 2020 and 2024, 2025, was that it wasn't smart enough to be useful. Everybody was focused, and all the labs were talking about number of parameters. Now, people don't care. The only question is, does it write good code? Does it give me good answers? Can it do things that I want done? That's because we've moved into a regime, into a world in which it's useful, and that's how it's measured.

1:41:09We did recognize this. We are really good at training. But right now, there's such demand for fast inference, such overwhelming demand, that we're allocating a lot of our attention to it. Alex?

1:41:23Peter Diamandis:I'm curious, Andrew. SRAM, you mentioned SRAM earlier. The largest models, really the standard models at this point that offer frontier capabilities and in some cases up to 10 trillion parameters. How do you think about SRAM when, correct me if I'm wrong, the wafer scale engine version 3, I think has maybe in the tens of gigabytes of SRAM? 40, 50. 40, 50, something like that. But the largest models are in the trillions of parameters. How do you think about the future of SRAM, given that, as you said, you're stuffing it to the gills? Right. I think the following. I think that models that size have to be divided up, whether you're using GPUs or TPUs or us.

1:42:07They have to be cut up, and they have to be spread over multiple chips. Remember, models that size, Alex, they have a very large matrix multiply in the attention head. And that doesn't fit on a GPU. You have to cut it up, and you have to go tensor model parallel. And you don't have to do that with us. But what you do have to do is spread that over four or six or eight chips. And what you do is you divide the model very carefully. And you divide it such that no layer runs over two chips. And so what you're moving, it results from one layer to the next. And you can move it because that's a very small vector.

1:42:49That's a results vector. You can move it over 100 gig ethernet. And it is slower. That little hop is slower. But the calculations that take up such a big portion of the time are so much faster that you pay a very small penalty for breaking it up into 4, 8, 16, 20 chips on the order of 2%. Now, other S-frame solutions that are small, like, for example, Grok that NVIDIA acquired, they have to break it up because they have only 800 square millimeters to use. They have to break a big model up over 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 chips. And each of those hops hurts their performance. While we have to do a few hops, they have to do thousands.

1:43:31And so, there's no way ever to fit everything on any size amount of memory. But there is a very nice and simple way for us to cleave models, to spread it over multiple chips. And yesterday, we announced and posted numbers on Kimike2, which is a trillion-parameter model in the open-source community. We were, of course, an order of magnitude faster than anybody else.

1:43:58Dave Blundin:Oh, really? How many wafers on that deploy? I forget. I've been busy. But it was about 1 ,000 tokens per second, where a really good GPU shop like Fireworks is running at 70. They're a really good shop.

1:44:1915X, that's pretty good.

1:44:22Dave Blundin:Peter and I were at Google I.O. yesterday, and they showed a whole rack of TPUs operating together, generating 1 ,400 tokens per second, writing code. You see that, and you're like, I need that. I need that tomorrow. The trick there, Dave, sometimes, and NVIDIA's been masterful at this sleight of hand, is not telling you whether they mean tokens per second per user or aggregate throughput. Ouch. The GPU is an extraordinarily good machine at generating slow tokens. You can generate an NVL72 at 35 tokens per second, which is painfully slow, can generate millions of tokens. On the other hand, if you ask it to generate tokens at 200 tokens per second per user, it can support one or two users.

1:45:15That's a$4 million solution working on one user. And so it's really important when you sort of dig into these, are they telling you gross throughput? Is this a lot of customers who are unhappy with their performance? Or are they able to serve that to individual customers and how many of them? Andrew, you said you were being complimentary of Elon as an extraordinary builder, entrepreneur, sort of following that earlier. One of the best in history, for sure. I'm curious. He steps up and announces TerraFab, produced 50 times the amount of chips on the planet that exist today, outstripping TSMC and everybody else.

1:45:59What do you think of TerraFab? I'm super curious. Look, I think Elon has proven himself on multiple dimensions. He's proven himself to be a visionary.

1:46:17Right? The number of people said you're an idiot to try and build cars in Fremont. Right? I mean, we've got the highest labor rates in the country, maybe among the highest in the world. We've got a regulatory regime that is unfriendly to business. The number of people who said you shouldn't build a rocket company. The number of people who didn't understand that he was building a rocket company because he wanted a satellite company needed. I mean, he has been ahead of everybody for a very long time. Okay. That's the vision side. That's the vision side. He's also been able to execute on some of them, not all.

1:46:53And that's what's cool is he is trying to do things that other people can't do. Now, this particular problem I know a little bit about, and building fabs is very hard. And it is hard in a different way than some of the other problems he's attacked. I'm not saying he can't do it. I'm saying it will always take longer than he says. It will cost vastly more money. And that's the challenge of building extraordinary things. It is not a 5 - or 10-year project in my humble view. I've been wrong before, but I put this at a 15 - or 20-year project. I think it's interesting. It's probably good for the U.S.

1:47:36that we have domestic fabs. But I think that there is a reason why, even with the exact same equipment from ASML, Samsung and TSMC aren't at the same node. TSMC is ahead, and they're extraordinary. And the amount of received wisdom and learning from the fabs they've built over generations cannot be underestimated. But if anybody can do it, Elon can do it.

1:48:08Dave Blundin:What does that mean for Cerebris? Because, you know, obviously U.S. manufacturing, and like you said, you know a lot about this topic. But U.S. manufacturing of chips is critical. I mean, critical for everything, for national defense, for, you know, the economy. Global security. Everything, yeah. Yeah, and so if it's going to take 15, 20 years, that's just TerraFab. And the TSMC migration to the U.S. is going very slowly, way behind schedule. So what does that mean just in terms of, well, first of all, supply demand, just the raw ability to get things made? You must deal with this every day. These things are hard to build, right?

1:48:48I mean, fabs are pyramids. They are our pyramids. And TSMC is the greatest manufacturing company on Earth. with. The challenge is, these things take five years to build, six years to build, and $50 billion,$40 billion from the people who built the last one. That's true whether it's TSMC or Samsung or any of the great builders here. These are unbelievably difficult to build. That's why they've been behind schedule in the U.S. I think they encountered some challenges that were unforeseen. I think we have political challenges in that these things take a long enough time that they cross administration boundaries.

1:49:33When your projects can't be done in four years and have to cut across multiple administrations, maybe two or three different administrations, over a period of time, when you have local ordinances that get in the way of building, as happened with Samsung's fab in Texas. They redesigned the fab because of a local fire ordinance that made no sense. These are painful problems that our system hasn't found a way to overcome. And so, I think that we have to find a way to do better, because I think the reshoring of fab, and not just the fab, fab gets all the glory, but the packaging business, every bit as important and something we lost entirely when the fabs left.

1:50:20Dave Blundin:Yeah, actually, good question. By the time you get something ready to put into one of your data centers or a third-party data center, how many different manufacturing partners has that wafer been through? A fair number. It goes to ASC, and it goes to someone who deposits RDL on the backside. It's diced, it's cleaned, it comes to us for a step. It is a long process. I think when we stopped caring about fabs in the 90s, and IBM left, and Global Foundries is fabs, we didn't do anything to keep them. We lost this collection of surrounding expertise. When a chip comes off a fab, it's a dead piece of silicon.

1:51:17The package is how you breathe power and life into it, how you get I.O. into it, and how you get power into it. And that's also an enormously challenging technology. It takes material scientists. It takes manufacturing engineering, process engineers, deposition engineering. And we punted all of that by not caring about this industry. And it's all sitting in Taipei and in Korea. The materials are manufactured in Japan. Kyocera is one of the leaders there. And we've got to get it all back. And we've got to make a decades-long commitment to this industry.

1:51:59Dave Blundin:Well, if you said that TerraFab is 10-plus years out, if I look five years out, do you think that your Cerebris is able to manufacture on Intel, Samsung, and TSMC? Are there any other choices?

1:52:16We've committed our 3-nanometer design to TSMC, so that will take us out a little bit. We do manufacture some components at Samsung and have a great deal of respect for Samsung's fab capabilities. We have never used Intel. Lipboo is an extraordinary leader and a longtime advocate for hardware in Silicon Valley. As you know, Dave, there was a period between about 2007, 2006, and 2015 or 2016, where every VC firm was filled with somebody from VMware who didn't know anything about hardware, who thought compute was made by flea feces in the cloud, and that there was some sort of thing in the ether that somehow was generating compute.

1:53:08And we tried to explain for a long time that the way you make more virtual compute is to begin with real compute.

1:53:13Dave Blundin:Well, I've got to tell you, you've inspired so many people that are in campuses right now that are eager to be part of your mission to get that back. I'm going to route as many as I can through this building. Please do. Guys like Andy Bechtusheim and Lipbu and a few others were continuing to put money into hardware, continuing to, Pierre Lamont continued to do it and support us as it was tough going to raise money over that time period. And I think, well, I know Lipboot. They've got a lot of work to do. And he's done great things so far, but we've got some work to do before we could move to Intel.

1:53:58Alex or Salim, do you have a question? I have a quick one.

1:54:02Dave Blundin:Andrew, you've gone from raw invention, solving fundamental big problems, to going to now production when you want to scale these things. Can you say how long it takes to create one of those chips? And over time, as you get better and more efficient in the manufacturing process, what do you hope it shrinks to? Well, I say that the first one took four years and maybe half a billion dollars, somewhere between 400 and 500 million dollars. That's why I take it to dinner when I go with my wife. Like a 10-year-old with his first dirt bike. I mean, it's coming to bed. It's in the bedroom. It's not outside in the garage.

1:54:46It is being carried around everywhere I go. I got a wafer. I think the inventions cut across lithography, chip architecture, packaging.

1:55:03Dave Blundin:Cooling. Cooling, power delivery and cooling. They included compiler inventions, algorithmic inventions. In fact, some of the hardest problems that we encountered were packaging. We solved them seven or eight years before others encountered them. The B200 was 18 months late. It was late because they had a problem with their co-os. What's that mean? David Gardner Coos is a process step where TSMC uses a 65-nanometer chunk of silicon as a motherboard. They put on that. They put on NVIDIA's chips in the memory. Instead of putting it on a green board, a traditional motherboard, they put it on a piece of silicon.

1:55:54The wires are more efficient in silicon. They can be narrower. This was a big invention. But we knew that there would be a problem with the coefficient of thermal expansion. And we knew that because we'd solved that problem in 2018. And so there they were in 2024-25, struggling with a problem that we'd solved seven years earlier. And that's what happens when you do pioneering work. You encounter problems, you have a chance to solve them long before the rest of the industry even encounters them and knows they're a problem. So, that is one of the joys. Obviously, in everything we do in engineering, there's a trade-off.

1:56:37The downside is, there's some low days. There are some days you go home, and some of these days stack up. We had about 18 months where we're spending$8 million a month, and we couldn't solve the problem. When you have board meetings every six weeks, You come in and you still can't solve it, and you're$100 million more in the hole, and then you're$120 million in the hole, then you're$140 million on the hole, and you still can't solve it. This is some low days. And then you have the IPO of the year, and it's a high day. That's right. Peter, you're one of the things... It's such an archetypal story of an entrepreneur.

1:57:22It's the entrepreneurial journey. It is. I think, Salim, one of the things I've learned along the way, this is my fifth startup, is that this shit will kill you if you can't modulate the highs and the lows. Yeah, it will. And for every entrepreneur, every CEO, and I tell them first that this is a pressure test on your soul. And second, the number of times you can get kicked in the gut before lunchtime and have it still be a good day as a CEO of a startup is amazing. Would you rather be doing anything else? No, this is all I know how to do. I'm a professional David in the battle with Goliath. This is what I know I have no interest in doing other things, and I have no interest in working with people who are other than those who want to attack the hardest problems.

1:58:10Peter Diamandis:Amazing. Alex, please. Speaking of the hardest problems, and it's almost in the name cerebrus, you have, I think, a$4 trillion transistor budget with your third-generation wafer scale engine. I'd love to talk maybe a little bit about what's at the end of the rainbow, projecting out, say, 10 years when you're on your nth generation model. What does the future look like? Does it look like brain uploads running on WSE8? What's the killer app? What does this look like in 10 years? Alex, I think one of the fun things about being an infrastructure builder is you don't have to have those ideas. No, really, I was with the team, and many of them are here in the mid-90s, that helped drive down the cost of networking.

1:58:58We built some of the first and fastest Ethernet switches. And we had no idea that WhatsApp would arrive, and that it would make possible, even for the poorest members of our society, to communicate home. And when I grew up in the 70s, the only thing I heard my grandmother say on the phone was, put your brother on, it's expensive. It was$4 a minute for my mother to call Australia, where her mother was. They spoke for six minutes a week. And the only thing I heard my grandmother say was, I'd say, hello, Boba. She'd say, put your brother on, it's expensive. And we put, in a company called Iago, along with many others, with Juniper and others, we put a small brick in the wall that made the cost of IP transport so low that somebody else could invent a technology that made it such that every person can talk to their grandparents no matter how poor they are anywhere in the world.

1:59:58And that's something that we didn't know. That's not the problem I set out to solve, and our company set out to solve. We set out to solve a problem as an infrastructure builder that we build roads. And what you drive over those roads and how far you take them, that's other people's work. What we're trying to do is allow people to do extraordinary things on our infrastructure. And so, when I think about what we're enabling, that's work for Sam. That's work for Iliad. That's work for others. What we're trying to do is make a compute platform on which their ideas can take flight. And what we know is you need faster calculations.

2:00:43Peter Diamandis:So, what I think I heard you say is that you're very deliberately not having opinions as to the future shape of the workloads that will run on your infrastructure. And you're primarily at this point deferring to the frontier labs to steer the future architecture of workloads. Today's frontier labs are new frontier labs, right? We are making bets that the world will continue to depend on sparse linear algebars and underpinning for all these calculations. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code.

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2:02:09Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. One final question. Orbital data centers. Fiction, real, must-have? Are you going to put your chips up there? I think, first, we have serious advantage in space. In space, some of the most expensive work is the chip-to-chip communication. We've had chips in space for a long time. That's what a satellite is. A satellite looks like a PC motherboard with a big camera stuck on it, a big telescope. If you unpack what's in one of these small satellites, every computer hobbyist will say, holy cow, that looks like a server motherboard with a telescope stuck to it.

2:03:01and then it's hardened. Communicating in building a cluster is actually much more complicated, because you have to do a lot of communication in this work. Moving the data from the land to the cluster is a problem that we've solved a long time ago. They will continue to improve it. So, being a big chip and having to move things off chip less often is a huge advantage. I think this is an exciting domain. I think, like many hard problems, the last 10 % don't take 10%. They take 90%. Self-driving is one of those categories. The last 10 % we've been sitting at for 8 or 10 years, and we're just now getting over the hump of the last 10%, because it isn't really 10%.

2:03:50I've got it in the 7 - to 10-year category.

2:03:52Peter Diamandis:So it's interesting, Andrew, just to pull on that very briefly, what I would have expected you to say to that would have been something like with the wafer scale engine, you had to design around faults. You had to be incredibly fault tolerant at wafer scale. And in a space environment with lots of ionizing radiation, you also need to be fault tolerant. And that Cerebris, with its experience with fault tolerance at wafer scale, is like the perfect computing platform for highly ionizing environments. I think we have lots of advantage, Alex, and you put your finger on one of them. You have to try and shield your silicon very differently in space, and you will get more flaws.

2:04:40There are single-bit errors, hard errors, a whole collection of errors that you have to contemplate. Our ability to shut down a core and route around it is an enormous advantage in that environment. I think we've got, as a community, some work to do over the next four or five years before we have sort of the truly hard part of getting them in space, orchestrating the software, getting them to communicate. So I've got it sort of out the better part of a decade before we have sort of production in space. I think it's a very sort of a worthwhile project to pursue, but it's out of the ways. All right.

2:05:29Andrew, we close out these segments with an AMA with our incredible subscriber base and would love to have you join us. So we've chosen eight questions from our comments, which we all love and read, and we'll be peppering them along. So I'll put them up here. Salim, I'm going to give you first shot. Andrew, you can look at the others and see, get ready for one of them. We have a second page we'll go to. So Salim, why don't you pick one of these?

2:05:54Dave Blundin:I'll go with the first one. If the world becomes compute constrained, does the 10 cent lawyer for everyone's thesis still hold? Does AI become a luxury? only the rich can afford. And this comes from at georust1. So this is a fairly, if you've been listening to the podcast, there should be a fairly clear path here, right? Because every major technology starts with scarce and very expensive. And then you saw this with computing bandwidth, DNA sequencing, solar energy. They all look very constrained and very expensive initially. But then the learning curve kicks in, infrastructure kicks in, and Javon Paradox kicks in, rights law arrives, competition arrives, and the cost collapse.

2:06:36Dave Blundin:AI computers going exactly down the same path. You may have some bottlenecks like chips and power generation data centers, but those become investment honeymoon pots and capital floods towards those bottlenecks, right? But the bigger insight is that AI is not consuming compute. It's helping design chips and optimize infrastructure, what Alex calls the inner loop. It's improving, it's compressing the models, et cetera, for that example. And the system becomes recursive. And as you have intelligence building more intelligence, this is why we get so excited by this future. It's gonna drive the cost of everything down to that.

2:07:18Dave Blundin:Maybe it's a$2 lawyer first, maybe it's 50 cents, but over time, it's gonna get to 10 cents. And it's down from a thousand an hour, right? Yes, exactly. Number two, I think the problem with lawyers and accountants is the structure of their business. Wrong business model for the future. It's exactly wrong. Selling hours, yeah. Their business is to stand between ordinary people and obscure knowledge. That's what your accountant does. You don't want to figure out what the tax rules are related to depreciation on a property you bought or was gifted to you in 2020. Who wants to know that? And so, what their business is, is the acquisition of obscure knowledge and the application of that knowledge to particular problems.

2:08:12That's exactly what language models are there. Don't you think, Andrew, that generalizes, though?

2:08:17Peter Diamandis:like what what are you other than uh gatekeeper of obscure knowledge regarding the highest

2:08:29they are actually uh you know the reason they're called counsel is when they're giving uh advice not on legal matters when they're giving good business counsel when it when common sense is challenging in a confusing environment. Those are when they're at their best. I think when you're drafting, all the documents you need for most things have already been drafted. We don't need another lawyer reviewing another NDA. Andrew, let's give you the next shot. Which question, two, three, or four, you want to choose? I think number three is interesting. I think there is a profound misunderstanding about how So let's read the question.

2:09:13Why can't money buy Elon or Zuck, a lead in AI? Can't they just buy the best talent? And that's from at Nova Rift. Great question. The answer is no. And I think, why couldn't Intel build a cell phone processor? At the time, they had the best fabs. At the time, they had the best computer architects. And they destroyed tens of billions of shareholder dollars failing. Same with AMD. It turns out in our industry that money and the acquisition of talent isn't enough. What is? There's something else. MTP.

2:09:52Peter Diamandis:What? Purpose. Massively transformative purpose is incredibly important. Intel could have said yes to Apple, though. No, but they could have. But the truth is, what led them to believe that they were in a position to say no to, Alan? Intel was chasing margins. Intel was infatuated with its own profits. They had an armed division that they sold off. Intel could have sold so far. Why? That's the thing we're trying to understand. The innovator's dilemma. They were fat and happy and lazy. Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe that there is something in your DNA that makes big mutations. Well, look, I'm sitting here saying all day long will take luck over school.

2:10:38But I'll also say that all day long, that extremely hardworking people with tremendous grit end up more lucky. And that both of those are true. That is life. It is really hardworking people over long periods of time who have integrity and ethics. right they get lucky more often and and that's um luck is not equally distributed to those who work hard and those who don't i think go ahead go ahead go ahead um i think i'm gonna throw in a

2:11:09Dave Blundin:quick plug here we're we're launching this service next week it's at shapingluck.com because one of the things is that luck is non-linear and in a world that's going exponential you want non-linear outcomes so if you're interested in go go join us at a webinar What's it called again? Shapingluck.com is the URL. Okay, awesome. Free webinar, come along. But I think, Alex, the question isn't, you know, of course they could. Why didn't they? Why did they miss it? Why did AMD miss it? Why did, right? Why did, for example, why did NVIDIA fail for decades at everything that wasn't a GPU? They failed to build an ARM processor that worked.

2:11:53I think it was called Snapdragon. I think they failed at Northbridge-Southbridge part. And they succeeded beyond anybody's expectations at a GPU. I think that the same question, I think, holds true for the Yankees. Right? No, no, no. Why doesn't the team with the biggest money win every year in the NFL? Why? I mean, there is something that we have, in thinking about organizations and talent, that we don't do a very good job of describing, that says there is something that is very hard to buy, and that has to be made, and that we don't seem to be able to articulate it well, and buying the most talent doesn't seem to be sufficient.

2:12:47You have to have a lot of talent. It's necessary. But it's clearly not sufficient. Alex, let's go to you next for a question. Want to get through our lightning round here?

2:12:56Peter Diamandis:Yes, of course. Suffice it to say I have some pretty different answers to some of these other questions. But I think I have to answer question number two, which it looks like might have been a response to a comment that I made in a previous pod episode. So the question is, why wouldn't Sam, I think referring to Sam Altman, cut a deal with Bezos and Blue Origin to become the other counterweight to Elon? and this is from Scott Ray Broomfield. So, I think the answer is that's probably on the table. If I were Sam, I would be exploring a variety of potential heavy launch partnerships to become a counterweight to Elon and SpaceX AI's Dyson Swarm.

2:13:34Peter Diamandis:I think heavy launch is going to become, is already arguably part of a critical element of the stack now for the future of compute. Space is becoming – As you know, right, New Glenn is more akin to Falcon 9 and doesn't hold a candle to Starship, which, by the way, will be making a launch attempt probably by the time this is out. Good luck to Elon on that launch attempt. Super excited. But Starship is coming in at a factor probably 100 times cheaper. I'm not sure that matters. Go ahead, Andrew. Andrew, go ahead. No, I think, Alex, all your points are right. I think that you underestimate Sam at your tremendous cost.

2:14:19I think what Sam has done again and again in our industry is see around corners that other people missed. He was trying to lock down data center capacity in space last year and the year before, when all the other foundation labs didn't see it. Really? He was trying to lock down memory. Oh, yeah, for sure. I didn't know that. His ability to look at an exponential and not be afraid of what it says in two or three years, while everybody else is afraid, saying, oh, we're not going to need that much, is extraordinary. And his reach is extraordinary. And so, with 100 % certainty, I will tell you that he is exploring deals with every possible way to get access to compute and data center capacity.

2:15:13And I can say that having watched from a distance, I have no inside information, but I've been dazzled by that ability of his. I think you underestimate that guy. I mean, you would think it would be enough to build the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism to get a lot of respect, right? You think that might be a sufficient feather in your cap. But I think he will certainly be in conversations to get compute, whether it's in space, or whether it's under the sea, or whether it's using falling water, using geothermal. He will be in those conversations, and his team will be there every single day.

2:15:57Alex, make one more point for you.

2:16:00Dave Blundin:who's on the big, big stage. That inside perspective is awesome. Alex, one point here is, again, if Elon's Dyson swarm is 500 ,000 satellites to a million satellites, it was like a launch every couple of minutes of a starship. You don't get that when you Glenn. So that vehicle isn't designed for the frequency of launch that we're talking about here. So could, you know, could Sam put up a mini constellation with Bezos? Sure. Could he put something up to really compete with what Elon's proposed? Not without new launch capability. That capability is unique on the planet if it pans out as expected.

2:16:41Peter Diamandis:Yeah, a few thoughts. There are lots of options. Yes, I agree with the contention that SpaceX is completely dominating mass to orbit. No question about it, including dominating historic mass to orbit. So if I'm Sam, I would be exploring probably a multi-channel strategy. A, I'd be exploring a deal with Elon and SpaceX to leverage SpaceX launch for my own Dyson swarm. I would be exploring alternative launch capabilities. And then if you really believe, again, I think this is the elephant in this space room. If you really believe that we're on this singularity-esque exponential, then the fabs don't need to be on the ground.

2:17:26Peter Diamandis:We can build fabs in space, and we may not be addicted to heavy launch five to ten years from now. And if you're Sam and you're playing the long game, then you're looking for ways to build fabs on the moon and in Leo that don't need the SpaceX near Monopoly. Amazing. Dave, do you want to take us to question four?

2:17:47Dave Blundin:Andrew, did you have another thought on NASA Space? No. I think building a fab on land is hard enough for me. Yeah. Sure, gee. I mean,$40 billion or$50 billion in five years doing something that one or two other companies in the world have ever successfully done. I can't really think hard about building fabs in space, knowing how hard they are on Earth. Great segue to question four, which is directly related. China is building massive compute capacity. Could they sell tokens to U.S. users at very low prices and disrupt providers? It's the same answer you just gave, Andrew. No, China is not building massive compute capacity when you're looking at tokens per second, the driver of AI.

2:18:38Dave Blundin:That's why they're so desperately wanting to import from the U.S. So, they're building as quickly as they possibly can. but it's not 5-nanometer, 4-nanometer, 3-nanometer technology. So, it's all bottlenecked ASML machines, fab construction, everything Andrew's been talking about. So, if they had the ability, they would love to do that, but they just don't have the compute. Yeah, the dimension in which they've chosen to invest so far is in power infrastructure. And at that, they're just playing better than us right now. They have upgraded their grid. They have tremendous power infrastructure. And we've made bad decisions there.

2:19:18We're stuck with a grid that's built in the 50s, that's designed not for what we'd like it for today. And we have trouble politically at the local, at the municipal, at the state, at the federal level, doing projects like infrastructure. What they have done is a tremendous amount of investment there. They're obviously starved of compute, but they're going to try and build on what they have, which is an absurd amount of power infrastructure.

2:19:48Dave Blundin:Yeah. Also, when enterprises are going to be doing most of the token purchasing, you're not just buying the token. You're buying trust. You're buying governance. You're buying reliability. You're buying compliance, et cetera, et cetera.

2:19:59Peter Diamandis:I would perhaps just add to this. It's worth noting that in the past week or so, there's been quite a bit of public reporting about how China is operating proxy services that are selling American tokens to Chinese users at incredibly low prices. Like 10x discounts in order to siphon the reasoning traces for training their own models. And that is quite disruptive. And Anthropik is pursuing that. Amazing. Andrew, we want to thank you for being on. We close out every episode with user-generated content. This is sort of our outro music. And so let's enjoy this one. It's called We Are As Gods, I guess, a comment to my new book.

2:20:45It's from Mossad Hermani.

2:20:45Dave Blundin:Today Andrew is as a god, so we have to, like, bow down to his success. I think being a CEO is sufficient, man. I don't want the responsibility of a DVD. I don't need any of that at all. Congratulations on an epic IPO. Amazing. Amazing. All right, let's listen to We Are As Gods by Musad Zamani. All right, enjoy.

2:21:27The future is forever. The mission is your soul. Take the full control.

2:21:43Dave Blundin:Oh, Peter sees the vision, and Alex writes the code. While Dave defines the logic, and Salim leads the road. The agency of one, see the power rise.

2:21:55Peter Diamandis:The exponential light beneath the digital skies Nice lyrics. That was a good one. Very cool. Again, thank you for joining us. Gentlemen, always a pleasure. I think we could have kept those conversations going for a couple more hours. Easily. Easily. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Be well now. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. 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.

2:22:37I 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. 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.