Is AI a Bubble? Experts Debate the Future of AI w/ David Blundin, Salim Ismail, and Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #190

27:36India is India is now our second largest market in the world. It may become our largest. We've taken a lot of feedback from users in India about what they'd like from us. better support for languages, more affordable access, much more. And we've been able to put that into this model and upgrades to CHAT GPT. So we're committed to continuing to work on that. So India, 1 .41 billion people, you know, the vast majority 80, 90 % in severe poverty, half of those in squalor, it's a nation that needs AI more than anybody for health and education. and OpenAI wants to go there and give it to them. I'm going to link this article with the next one, which is OpenAI in talks provide GPT plus to the whole of UK.

28:28And it's not this article on its own isn't critical, but here we have these companies going in and saying, hey, let's give your population, your school kids, your factory workers, everybody access to our model. And I do think it's sort of a learn grab. What do you guys think? I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on this guys. Something is going on beyond just the cover story here. I know it for a fact, when we were at OpenAI, not this trip last week, but the prior one about five weeks ago. I said, why don't you guys open an office in Boston? We have like 10 times more computer scientists in Boston than you have here in Silicon Valley.

29:08Incredible talent pool. And they said, well, not gonna do that because AI, strong AI is imminent, and this workforce is going to be all AI's. But then they go a couple weeks later and open this huge new office in New Delhi. And they're like, okay, you skipped right over Boston and New York and went right to New Delhi. That's not coincidence. And if you look at the demographics of India, it's the biggest population in the world, just crossing China right now. But the age is right in that 20 to 35 sweet spot is much bigger than any other country in the world. It's the young and also a more core.

29:41Mccore is now at a $10 billion valuation. You know, the Brendan Fouitti story, which we can talk about if we have time. But Mccore is almost entirely operating in India now, in terms of recruiting talent for the big AI companies. So something beyond just the biggest market in the world is definitely part of this plan. I'd love to hear. Well, we were talking about overhangs, right? The intellectual overhang in India is unbelievable. I don't know if you know the story of the mathematician, Ramanujam. This is an obscure account in India 100 years ago and he sent him to Cambridge and he got a lot of racism so he came back, died in obscurity.

30:17And then his widow handed in all his mathematical notes after he died. And he found that there's like seven problems in mathematics that have never been solved for like a thousand years and he solved five of them. And so they were at teams of PhD students where Ravrosin is narrowing the notes now. I forgot how the elderly do this. And this is an endemic across India. I think the bigger issue here is the infrastructure and energy and bandwidth and so on that need to be solved first because you're hitting people at the, you know, as you mentioned, that our large number of Indians are below the poverty line.

30:51Right? And so this will give them, this has a double effect of allowing them to get out of that if you can get them the computer infrastructure to travel themselves out of there. The potential is unbelievable. Yeah, I tend to agree broadly that there are several, maybe two or three feedstocks to what we perhaps think of as global abundance and abundant intelligence or abundant superintelligence is arguably one of the most important inputs to Saleem's point to our arguably abundant energy is another one of those feedstocks. If the world is just drowning in intelligence and energy, maybe materials, query, whether material, scarcity, just follows, or is resolved automatically with energy and intelligence, post -scarcity.

31:41I think everything else, all of these global abundance challenges that we speak of, I think all of these are downstream of those input, those feedstocks, and can be resolved and mitigated much more easily. That's one thought. The other thought regarding UK specifically is this starts to look like a prime example if it were to come to fruition of what one might call universal basic compute, UBC. And UBC may be called that a special case of larger class of approaches universal basic services, sort of the supply side, a dual of universal basic income. And the future looks very interesting if every citizen of a country is automatically supplied with a basic level of computing.

32:28You know, I also think this is going back to your question, Dave, is this is an economic play. You know, if you can go in and get your software in as the basis to a billion people on the planet who are going to use your software to create more income for themselves and get a better life and then be able to pay for your software. I mean, you know, isn't this just an ability for them to, you know, I'm trying to find a good analogy without going to drugs and giving the school kid a taste of a drug just to make sure that they start to use it. I mean, this will become addictive to entrepreneurs and educators and healthcare workers and government workers over the next few years.

33:13And the question is, if you start using OpenAI, chat GPT -5 and 6 and so on, would you switch or this has become baseline for a billion people in India. Let's go to our next story here. And this is just part of OpenAI's mission. Your Dave, you and I spoke about this when we were up at OpenAI headquarters last week. So OpenAI's global data center dominance, opening up two large compute centers, one in Texas, Texas Stargate, up to five gigawatts capacity. Again, note, we're measuring the data centers in terms of power, not numbers of GPUs. And then the Norway mega center, 290 megawatts, in this case, 100 ,000 GPUs, powered by hydro.

34:00It's interesting. I was in Brazil talking, Brazil is a very energy rich country. And I was saying, look at what's happening with OpenAI and Norway. They're going there for the hydropower. If you want data centers down here, make sure you get your access to power and make it available. Power is sort of the firm one that attracts the data centers there. Dave, what are your thoughts here? This came up in a big way when we were at OpenAI last week, because I was out in Kevin Wheel. Is there a vulnerability for OpenAI in this area? Because the big competitors have Google has massive data centers from years of GCP and Microsoft has huge data centers.

34:39And Kevin's answer was, yeah, we'll start it. It'll be online. And these are the biggest data centers, biggest investments, humanity's ever made. But OpenAI is starting from not having any data centers at all. He did confirm also that they're doing their custom chips. I don't know if that was public information. I guess it is now, but doing custom chips as well. So I think all the horses in the race now are running in parallel with huge infrastructure build out, build out custom chips. And then now, the new thing is the AI designing the chips. Yeah, and the data centers. And soon the energy supply to the data centers.

35:18And soon predicting which politicians are going to support the data centers. So, you know, it's all AI all the way down. All right, I want to play a short clip from CNBC here. This is with Sarah Freyer, who's the CFO at OpenAI. This is going to sort of wrap up our OpenAI only segment. We'll go to the rest of the AI world in a moment. But here it is, opening IHITS 1 billion per month in terms of revenue, CFO, Warren's of huge compute demand. And there was a buzz about some remarks that Sam made about, is there an AI bubble? We'll talk about that a little bit. The olipere outcome was actually great.

35:59I think our numbers were up something like 50 % just week over week on the number of tokens and so on being used. What we see is tokens in particular for agenteic behavior and so on almost doubled. Reasoning, which is why I get real excited about, because that's a place where I think we've really extended our lead, was up 8x in terms of usage of the reasoning components of the model. So tell me about this. Sam has a dinner. I believe that in San Francisco. He does. And he says at the dinner though, this is the famous dinner in the last week, where he says that there could be an AI bubble that's taking place.

36:34Do you believe there's an AI bubble when I say that in the context that there's apparently a secondary sale of some of your private stock that some of your employees may be trying to sell at a $500 billion valuation. Amazing. So Dave, is there an A .O. bubble? There is definitely not a bubble in two things. Sam, first of all, is now in full -board downplay mode because he doesn't need to hype it anymore. He's exactly where he needs to be. So he's in full -board downplay mode. We've seen that before. And then there are plenty of bad investments out there. All kinds of charlatans running around raising capital.

37:11And those companies will fail. And then people will say, see, I told you it was a bubble. But that's not true. It's the tailwind is like nothing we've ever seen. And everybody is now, you know, whether they know what they're doing or not, they're all kind of jumping on the ship. All the business school people are coming out of the woodwork and getting involved. And so yeah, there's going to be some bad investments. and then people will say, yo, it was right, it was a bubble. Absolutely not a bubble. It's the biggest shift in human history. And the worst thing you can do is not get on board and ignore it.

37:39That's the worst move you can make. Selim. For me, this is a smacked of trying to manage your market cap. You've got employees trying to sell their stock on secondary and you're like, oh my God, I'm trying to raise money out here separately. This is a total disaster. I have to do something, I have to say something. So this is what it looks like for me. Those numbers that Sarah was quoting were the jumps in users and compute right after the GPT -5 announcement because there's a lot of conversation, right? Just to be clear, this is the biggest announcement on the planet, right? This was hyped, not necessarily by OpenAI, but by the world.

38:16OpenAI's got the GPT -5, right? The Leopold, action -brenner paper was like, we're going to have this recursive self -improvement when we get there. So hard take off. And I think everybody was expecting, you know, again, AGI, and we got, you know, a simpler model with lower costs and not what was expected. But the world has responded doubling and redoubling on their use of open AI. Alex, what do you think of the GPT -5 model? You've been playing with it. Is it everything it's been cracked up to be? I've been very impressed. So prior to GPT -5 thinking and GPT -5 Pro, I -03 and O -3 Pro were two of my favorite models.

39:00And GPT -5 thinking especially is increasingly my go -to model for most tasks. It feels like a credible improvement. And I also think more broadly on this point of trillions of dollars being spent on data centers, as long as the revenue growth continues to grow spectacularly, I think the party can continue for capital expenditures on data centers and the way that I yeah Sorry, there's just something else here. This really important Alex in our last podcast You talked about the fact that GPT -5 uplift 700 million people into three models, right? And that that is a massive massive jump and we're gonna just start to see the beginnings of that over the next few weeks and months Totally, and there is a recursive element to it in the sense that if 700 million people, many of whom are now using reasoning for the first time, are using reasoning and then using that to increase their productivity and their intellectual output and their economic output, that starts to recurse back through the system and feedback more, more available capital, more real capital into the system to build more data centers and empower more people.

40:06and it's a wonderful positive feedback loop. And then, I really love Alex's thoughts on this downplaying of expectations, because we now have infinite appetite for compute, which has never existed in the world before. Like, if I'm running spreadsheets and I have a billion computers, who cares? Like, it's still a spreadsheet. But now all of a sudden, it's completely inverted with infinite appetite, and Sam has to be very careful about what he can promise to the world, because it's all completely constrained at the compute level. And so when you demonstrate like a VO3 capacity, people get very excited about it, but then you realize, oh, wait, I have way too many users, I can't actually deliver it.

40:47So that's, I think, what's driving the, what we'll hold on, guys, where we want to be, we're capable of doing a lot more than we wanted to show on GPD 5 launch day. But if we show it, then people will want it, and we just can't deliver it till Stargate's online. And even then, it'll be constrained. Yes, I think to your point, I think what we're starting to see emerging, albeit in late inform at the moment, is a micro -economics of productivity, protocons. Some tokens, if we assume just naively that every token is equally expensive to deliver or to generate, some tokens are much more economically productive than others.

41:26So one could imagine, protocon, maybe some sort of spreadsheet agent, very productive, on -locks huge productivity, but maybe video generation relatively less productive per token. So I think we're going to start to see a new micro -economics of token level productivity emerge. Fastly told me about this by an AI, of course. Of course, of course. Everybody, there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin.

42:00And honestly, I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product called One Skin, OS01, twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it, and like I say, I use it every day twice a day. There you have it, that's my secret. You go to oneskin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. All right, let's go to the AI wars for the rest of the field. And again, just to be clear, we've been speaking about OpenAI and GPT -5, but we're about to see Gemini III coming online and then GROC -5 coming online.

42:43And it's just a literally leveling up week on week on week. So in the rest of the field here, Claude Sonnet IV now supports a million tokens of context. A million tokens is a good amount. I mean, I remember in the early days being able to only put in a few pages at a time, a million tokens is about 750 ,000 words 3 to 4 ,000 pages of text I asked for an analogy and GPT -5 said, hey, it's the entire Harry Potter series and we're seeing what GROC probably somewhere in the in the five to 600 ,000 tokens right now GPT -5 is around 250 ,000 tokens. It was a nice step up. Any thoughts on this, Dave?

43:31Huge, huge, huge. Everybody thinks, why don't you need that? What am I going to do with the million tokens? Then what happens is the AI is so productive for you. If you write code, if you're writing text, it's so productive that you end up with a massive amount of stuff you've created very, very quickly. And it will forget what you did the day before because you've moved so far in a day. So expanding that context field allows it to remember a lot more of what you're already working on and you know, and the first day you don't care By day three you care tremendously. I've written more code in the last two weeks than in the prior 40 years of my life Wow and and it's functional.

44:11It's incredible. It's working. It's self -documenting but now my hard drive I have literally what but almost a terabyte of code and text that I've created in the last week. And it needs the context to remember everything that it was already working on. It's never enough. It's the rate that everything's accumulating. It's just never enough. So this helps a lot, actually. Is there an upper limit to the context window? Or is it just purely compute -based and ram -based? There's no theoretical limit that I'm aware of right now to an upper limit for context window sizes. I do remember when 64 kilobytes should be enough for anyone.

44:50If you feel like we're in that era now where one can reasonably foresee a few years out, maybe we'll have effectively infinite context. And when we find ourselves in that world, retrieval augmented generation, RAC, maybe that goes out the window, maybe fine tuning of models, goes out the window completely. Why bother doing any of that? If you can just dump your entire company's corpus of knowledge, code documentation emails all into the context window and get effectively free marginal intelligence. This is exactly why Blitzy is signing deals as quickly as they can have meetings. Blitzy has this infinite context window coding capability and it took him a solid year and a half to develop and and now it can take an infinitely large context and restructure it to fit into whatever windows available.

45:38So Dave, just take a second because we're going to be doing a a podcast with the CEO of Blitzy. Take a moment. This is a company that you incubated, you supported, and Link Ventures basically financially backed. Give me some context and properly here on Blitzy. Yeah, so Blitzy is two best friends from Harvard Business School, one who went to West Point who's an organizational genius, Brian Elliott, and Sid Pardeshi, his co -founder who's a technical genius from India, also came to Harvard Business School. They founded the company together they're in our office, is still, and I was taking over the office space, like a board right now, eating desks.

46:17Like I said, signing deals as quickly as they can have meetings. Also, they're a Harvard Business School professor joined the company. So you know, that's a good sign. And then my youngest son also jumped on board, because it's just, it's just sucking everything up. So they write, you know, two, three, four, five million lines of code in a night. It's all fully debugged and functional the next day. And the original use case was, was, hey, there's all this legacy code, mainframe code that hasn't been touched in a decade, incredibly expensive to maintain. Can AI come in and just rewrite all that in a modern language, make it much more efficient, move it to the cloud?

46:52And so that's a lot of their bread and butter. But now they're moving on from there into Greenfield. Like, yeah, what can we create from scratch that didn't even exist in the world before? And, you know, the specs for these, before even launch the code, the specs become these 100, 200, 300 page documents, all written by AI. And it's just hard to keep up and even proofread them before you hit the go ahead and build it launch button. So they're really on the forefront of building really big things in really short timeframes and having the system debug and fix itself and something fully functional comes out the other side.

47:24I love that. I love that. All right. Coming out the other side, we have perplexity making a $34 .5 billion bid for Chrome. You guys really love perplexity. I've just started using it to look at it compared to Google. So this is a $34 .5 billion unsolicited offer. You can imagine you're sitting at Google headquarters and someone comes up and says, I want to buy your favorite child. Here's $34 billion. So the offer is larger than perplexity's reported valuation. And I guess the concept here is that alphabet and Google have been under incredible regulatory pressures that could force them to divest, you know, to split it up.

48:10You're making too much money. You're dominating the field. They are the projected winner of the AI race by a lot of the experts out there. So thoughts here. I mean, is this anything other than a PR play, Selim? I think two things. One is a PR play. I think second is here's what I predict happens I think the Trump administration gets involved and says well you want to give us 10 % of Chrome's to help you keep protective. That's what I think. Oh good. Yeah. Well, so what was going on here though is Google was claiming that Chrome can't be split from from Google because it's useless without Google and nobody would want it and perplexity wanted to show the FTC will take it and we'd be willing to pay for it.

48:59So it absolutely is not inseparable iris and separatized or whatever. It can't be removed from Google. It has to stay inside perplexity saying no, that's absolutely not true. And it's all part of the grand strategy. I think they would buy it if Google was willing to part with it. But it's more, you know, it's not PR, it's business strategy trying to keep the FTC active in this breakup. All right. I love this next sequence of stories. So Meta freezes AI hiring after going on a blitzkrieg. We'll use that term and offering everybody, you know, I haven't gotten the call yet. I'm not sure if you got the call yet, Dave.

49:40And I guess I'm not going to expect the call yet from Zach. But after 150 plus researchers, you know, with salary packages in the tens of millions to reportedly a billion dollars, Meta has stopped it's hiring. It's reorganizing its AI teams to four groups, AI products, super intelligence, infrastructure, and fundamental AI research. And I'm going to match that story with the following story, which is now Microsoft is fighting back. It's, you know, what's the what's the Star Wars analogy here at Attack of the Clones or the Empire flights back to the Empire Strikes Back? The Empire Strikes Back, yes.

50:21And Microsoft is the Empire. So Microsoft is now offering multi -million dollar pay packages matching the enormous offers that Meta was making. And it's trying to raid the Meta coffers. Microsoft created an internal most wanted list of engineers and researchers. It's great. Then they fast -tracked hiring process. It's been set like if it's critical AI talent, you can receive an offer within 24 hours. Now, I think the backstory here, somebody should make a movie immediately about this, but the backstory is really interesting too. There was complete peace and detent for a long time between Apple, Microsoft, Google.

51:02They basically settled in this mode where Apple you keep cranking out the phones, our Microsoft phone failed miserably, we'll give up on it. Microsoft Office, that's our cash cow, Google Docs, you need to sit there and not threaten Google Docs and return, being will not threaten Google Search. And, you know, it's not all written down anywhere because that would be illegal, but it's clearly stable. And that lasted for what, 10, 12, 15 years of stability. Now they're colliding and fighting like you would not believe over AI. And it is Full bore going after your best people anything I can do to get ahead start on you But we've never seen all the tech giants going after one brass ring before and so it's it's really great for startups Because we have turbulence in chaos, which is always great for the new guys coming in Dave that is beautifully said buddy.

51:52That is beautifully said. Selim Well, there's seven big companies and there were seven kingdoms in the game of thrones and it feels to me like that is what's going on. Totally agree with Dave. This is full. I mean, I was in at Yahoo and you'd see people very politely moving between companies, but it was very, very delicately done and the rip -back channeling non -stop to kind of make sure everybody was okay with it. It was only really great models of co -op petition that was out there, but now the gloves are off. Yeah, it is a winner take -all and and here's the other side of the equation. You know, interesting here, we have unlikely bedfellows, Elon tried to enlist Zuck in a hundred billion bid for open AI.

52:39This is more just this just soap opera land. I want to say anything more than that, but that was fascinating. This came out in the news. And then I want to close this segment on companies going after each other's employees on this CNBC article. It says AI deals creating zombie startups. And yeah, you go in and you hire the CEO, the CTO, and you leave the rest of the team there sort of like, oh my god, how do we just, we just took, you know, $100 million a capital and we can't deliver our products. Dave, are you seeing this? Zombie, zombie companies? I mean, this is the best friend model. Yeah, yeah.

53:22Yeah. Yeah, no, it started with character AI, you know, Google, but no, I'm shizzier back for, wow, six billion or something like that. And that started the wave. And now it's all the rage. But that Windsor deal was the real bell weather. Because Windsor was a, you know, very uncompanying 18 months something like that acquired for $3 billion in a huge windfall by OpenAI, oh wait, Microsoft blocked the deal. And then it turned into an aqua hire of the talent into Google. But what did the shareholders get? And that's still in flux, you know, and I'm pulling our seed stage friends that are in that deal saying, did you get ripped off and wiped out by this?

53:59Or, you know, what does this mean for the venture world? Venture capitalist I talked to are not super worried about it. It's not like, you know, it's not affecting that many of their investments, but it's, you know, it really wrecks the whole venture landscape if this becomes the de facto standard, you know, kind of end game for a great start up. There's a whole meme around the fact that VC, the cat as a category is going to be ending soon around this tool with this is one of the Jigsaw puzzle pieces that breaks the whole thing. It's a really bad Problem from a VC perspective just because if you don't know what's gonna happen with that startup What are you gonna do with it?

54:39Especially in a hot area, right? Traditionally, that's where you funded it. If somebody comes up licenses the tech and then hires all the people you're left in it with a shell. If this becomes systemic, this will be a big problem. I mean, I expect to see a bunch of lawsuits coming out of this. Probably. A lot of this is also the antitrust laws, right? There was a lot of challenges in being able to acquire companies. I mean, companies that wasn't an IPO window for the last number of years finding that's opened up. And so you try and acquire the company and then antitrust would say, know you can't do that.

55:12So you'd buy, you know, as with Alexander Wang, you'd buy, you know, 49 % of the company and effectively get control of it. And now instead, why don't just, you know, hire the talent? Yeah, that's the deal. It's a, you buy 49 % non -voting. So that doesn't trigger the FTC and Hearts Cut Redino and all that. And then you move all the best employees over with huge pay packages. And then there's a commercial deal where you license all the technology. And that's not disclosed. So you have no idea what's buried in there. It could be like you owe us all of your children for the next 10 generations for all we know.

55:50And you just don't know. But that's the standard deal because it doesn't have to go through the waiting period. And so in the race to AI, the big tech companies are desperate to move as quickly as possible. So this is really, you know, if you read Excelorondo, Alex's will recommend I actually recommend that to you all day long. Manfred Mann, the character in the beginning, the whole structure of the way things are created has to get rethought because of the pace of AI. And this is kind of the first foray into that new terrain that we're saying. And just in terms of the venture community, we have multiple companies reaching multi -billion dollar valuations in under two years.

56:26Prior to this wave of AI, I only counted seven times in the history of the world that that's ever happened. Now we have three in a single portfolio. So the tailwind for venture is unbelievable, like bigger than ever, ever, ever before. So I don't want to leave the impression that something's about to fall apart in venture. These are relatively rare deals, but it is the first bell weather on the new economy is coming. And some things need to be rethought just for speed. A few quick articles about XAI, so XAI co -founder, Igor Babushkin exits to launch an AI safety venture. I'm in growing executive turnover at XAI.

57:04Kaparthi, Kaparthi is who headed Tesla's AI systems is thought to be coming in for XAI. We'll see if that gets announced. Alex, any thoughts on this one? Yeah, I love to Egor's farewell note regarding XAI. He told his life story of how he first went into AI because he wanted to solve science. So in some sense, now this is the perfect time now that AI is arguably on the verge of solving science for him to strike out and fund ventures in that area. Nice. I love this article, again, in the Elon X universe. So Elon on AI increasing birth rate. So here's a tweet. AI is obviously going to one shot the human limbic system.

57:49I love that. And this, of course, is the idea that, you know, why get married? I have an AI girlfriend. I have an AI robot. But he goes on to say I predict counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate. We're going to program it that way. So a couple of quick thoughts here. One, we're going to program it that way. Your AI is subtly telling you, hey, you should have kids. Hey, go get another girlfriend. Hey. You know Elon's got 15 kids you should have 15 to So I looked at you know when I saw this in the prep for this I don't understand any one of those statements at all If any of you could explain any of those what do you mean AI is gonna one -shot the human you limit existing?

58:38How will that happen just so any insights from any of you? I would really love it because this makes no sense to me at all So I understand it. I just don't want to comment on it. What I will say, though, is putting aside understanding any change, AI driven or otherwise in the birth rate would take decades to be felt in demographics and the changes that we're seeing in AI otherwise right now are a much shorter time scale, the time scale of months to low numbers of years, not decades. So I'm not sure it really ends up mattering either way. So just taking a second to think about the decreasing birth rate, we've discussed this at length that places like South Korea, Japan, China, much of the world other than what we've seen in India and Africa is below the replacement level of 2 .1.

59:31Some countries are dangerously as low as 0 .7 and they're literally sublimating. They're evaporating. And the question is why is a birth rate going down? Well, a couple of things. One, women's education is going up. So women are desire to stay in school more. Number two, as people move into the cities, it's more expensive to bring up kids. Number three, the child mortality rate is lower. A lot of children in God, the rate of number of children per family back in 1950s was on average globally above five. And we've seen this precipitous drop, because kids are living. You don't need to have an extra two or three kids to make sure they're there to work the farm.

1:00:17So all of these have reduced the birth rate. And the question, I think logically, is if we do have abundance, if you have access to robots for helping raise your kids, if you have access to AI and universal basic income of some sort to help you with income, can we shift back to building families instead of having to work or instead of having to make choice between work and a family? That might be part of the Elon Musk counterintuitive approach. Well, I know Alex needs to keep his reputation pristine because he does a lot of work for government agencies and also nobody wants to irritate Elon. But this quote from Elon goes hand in hand with the one he had a year ago where he said, look, of course AI is going to be smarter than all of us.

1:01:13We're not as smart as we think we are. And basically, the undercurrent here is, look, AI is going to be incredibly persuasive very soon. It is persuasive already. It's more persuasive than the best humans. Well, so then the purpose of that last quote, I don't know why he's being so honest about this, but Yeah, the natural state is the birth rates can plummet to near zero, but the AI We're gonna program it to convince you that it's a good idea to ask kids as a way to stabilize human population That's a dangerous that's a dangerous message that we're gonna program AI to influence you on anything Yeah, exactly.

1:01:49That's why it's kind of hard to touch the slide but that is exactly what he means. I don't know why he's saying it because they're backlash in the years, but he's saying it. All right, I love this. Musk acknowledges Google's the lead in AI. So Elon concedes that Google currently has the highest probability of being the leader in AI, citing its massive compute infrastructure and data reserves. Google's dominance is backed by 85 billion in an AI -related capital expenditures and strategic investments, like at a 14 % stake in Anthropic. So we look at all the prediction markets, and we saw even in GPT -5, when GPT -5 was announced, we saw the prediction markets all of a sudden flip to, yeah, Google's gonna win the race by the end of August, by the end of the year.

1:02:41Alex, do you believe this as well? I think this is more a reflection that winning, quote unquote, is a combination of spending enormous amounts of capital to build out data center and compute capacity, plus default distribution. That could come with billions of users from an existing service or from a new service like ChatGPT that's just emerging and reaching toward a billion graphs by the end of this year. But that winning combination of both enormous miscapex for compute and default distribution, that's what I think this quote, and more broadly, the conventional wisdom right now suggests is what it takes to win as a frontier lab in AI.

1:03:24So Lim. Two things, kind of positive and negative here. The positive is I think, well, the negative is, I think as a building kind of cutting -in idea AI, we've always seen that a small team will outperform a big company always. And so therefore, this is the state of the investment in traffic and so on, is super, super smart here. But Google itself, I don't think we'll do it. It'll rely on some of these external teams. On the positive, there are access to compute and infrastructure is so ridiculous. And as Dave mentioned earlier, now that the operand is simply this infinite demand for compute, that that may be the reason why they win.

1:04:04Yeah, maybe. I think the real race actually under the covers. and the real races between the TPUs at Google and the Dojo chips at XAI or Tesla, wherever those are theoretically made. The Elon chips, because they decided that $16 billion, which is really more like a $40 billion deal with Samsung to manufacture those chips. That's a lot of chips. I think you'll get the data centers to put the chips in. The question is the relative performance of the dojo chips compared to the TPUs and the other next generation chips that are getting designed right now. So it's a foot race. He's conceding because he wants to kind of just look at the look over here.

1:04:46And we work on this over here. Perhaps. So at the same time that Elon making that statement, here is some interesting data. Users are choosing Groc over Gemini. So in terms of the star rating of of Google Gemini at 4 .8 and 394 ,000 downloads and ratings versus GROC at 4 .9 and 502 ,000 downloads and ratings. It's interesting. Maybe, you know, listen, part of this is that Elon's got the largest megaphone of everybody being able to on Twitter, on X be able to say, Hey, check out what X can do. Download it here. That works pretty well. Yes, it's exactly right. And he's using it aggressively. And in theory, Google has a bigger megaphone, because Google Search is actually bigger than X.

1:05:40But it cannibalizes. So that's the issue. If Google were to push this as hard as possible, the extreme would be to say you could only use Google Search through Gemini. Then they'd bypass Groc in a heartbeat, but it would cannibalize their entire revenue engine. and Grock doesn't have that hang up. So it's really an interesting little balance in this great war that's going on. What I love is the fact that with the ratings like 420 and 4 .9, regardless of who's ahead, the users win. Yeah, that's a good point. Dave, there's another point here worth discussing that you know, I've discussed in the past, probably not on our moonshots podcast, which is having a celebrated CEO who's out there makes a big difference, right?

1:06:29So, you know, Elon love him to hate him and I would never bet against him, is out there constantly putting himself out there tweeting, you know, 30 ,000 times a day, literally. And I've been with him at parties and events and he's in his phone, you know, tweeting away and then he'll pop up and have a conversation with you and he's back into his phone. So, you know, it's him to a large degree. I'm not sure anybody else is posting for him. But we don't see that from Sundar. We see this from Sam. Sam is out there as much, but doesn't have the platform yet. I'm certain that OpenAI will eventually create their own platform equivalent.

1:07:12We're seeing it a little bit from Dario and Anthropic, but I think that's so important. when you want to speak to that? I totally don't so glad you brought it up. Because when Elon did Saturday Night Live, that was the turning point, where the definition of what it means to be a great CEO completely flipped on that day. Cause here's the busiest guy on the planet and finding time to go to New York and be the host of Saturday Night Live. Why would you make that choice? It's not random. It's not ego, it's part of a strategy. Why are you doing this? Because it clearly works for recruiting and capital raising and a Trax talent.

1:07:47And it's like you've been saying forever, Peter, you have to have an MTP. You have to have to have a massively transformative purpose that improves the world. But just having that purpose and not broadcasting, it doesn't recruit. If you have the purpose and you broadcast it, then talent floods to you like they're coming to Elon, they're coming to Dario. Because you're out there and people recognize you. And you know, social media is the cheapest form of media in the history of the world. If you don't embrace it and get out there, it's just It's just the way you win as an entrepreneur now. You embrace it, you get your voice out there, you get your face out there.

1:08:19Again, people, entrepreneurs. We have incredible population of entrepreneurs and builders who watch this podcast. And just a piece of advice, if you are passionate, if you want to change the world, it's not enough to just be on your computer putting out code. Either you or your co -founder, someone on your team needs to have an outsized personality out there, letting people know what you stand for, what you're doing. I think it's critical. All right, let's move on here to our next article. And it's Google drops AI model that runs on 1 % battery power. So Gemma 3, 270 million parameter model. It's tiny, smart AI model that runs right on your phone.

1:09:07It can handle 25 chats using just 1 % of battery power on a Pixel 9 Pro. So again, this is AI that's being infused power efficiently into your phone and soon into everything that you touch, feel, and use on a day to day basis. Thoughts, gentlemen? I'll chime in and suggest I think this may actually be more instructive regarding what the future of foundation models and frontier models look like then say the large high parameter, multi trillion parameter sparse models. My suspicion is that if I had to predict what is the most futuristic possible frontier AI model look like, I think it probably will look like some sort of nanocolonel maybe with far fewer parameters even than Gemma 3 with 270 million.

1:09:59Maybe it'll only We have a few million parameters. Maybe it'll dispense with the notion of parameters entirely, but be sort of like a small diamond nano -curnal of an AI that doesn't have memorized the world's knowledge. That's all externalized to some external database or knowledge -based, but it's multi -modal. It understands video and text and audio. It's able to reason, but it's everything else, everything else is externalized. And I think this sort of gem, this sort of perfect crystallized super intelligence is where all of this ends. Fascinating. So, I mean, the value, the reason we're going to these small models is simply power.

1:10:41But part of it is just the desire to push inference compute to the edge, to enable local chatbots on phones. But I think ultimately these SLM's small language models are going to power the largest, the largest LLMs frontier models in the data centers as well. The question is, what is, given that we arrived at this AI revolution by compressing all human knowledge into a smaller model as possible, is there another phase transition where we can compress it even further and figure out what that nucleus of superintelligence looks like? I think we're going to get there in the next few years. Yeah, a little more importantly this enables that lawnmower checking the weather LLM type that's saying right because you can embed this and everything.

1:11:26I think that that granular design it allows you to go up a little long tail of edge cases which there are an infinite number. Sure. So I think that division no that division that Alex laid out there two two parts of it that I'd look at you what one is that when you take one of these you know one to 10 trillion parameter, mega neural nets. All world history is baked into those parameters, just a massive amount of information, most of which you don't need. So there has to be this diamonds nugget that Alex was describing that has to exist where it can call on data, you know, just by looking things up, but it has the same level of brilliance as the big model, it just doesn't have all that waste.

1:12:05And then the other thing is, you know, if you talk to the liquid AI team, they're really fixated on this notion that these Apple devices have an an incredibly good neural processor in every single phone, every single laptop, and it's largely unutilized. And if you can move that diamond nugget into that latent compute that's in hundreds of millions of devices, it unleashes a huge amount of intelligence, especially during this next two to four year window, when big data centers are struggling to catch up. So there's a big short -term opportunity and unleashing all that compute in some useful way.

1:12:40And so this takes advantage of that. All right, I'm going to move us along next to articles from CNBC. The US government takes a 10 % stake in Intel. Oh my god, what a story this has been, right? So the White House invested I think actually the White House and and the chips act actually granted Intel $8 .9 billion. They're turning that grant into an investment. I'm so curious about what conversations took place in the White House when and Lippu, Tan met with the president. But we've seen Intel stock rise on this news. Our friend Leopold Ashenbrenner who took out call options on Intel has made a killing in that process.

1:13:24Dave, you and I were talking about that the day we discovered it. Oh my God, what a trade that would have been. Well, hey, watch the podcast, listen closely, get those tips. But we didn't know that that lipoo would be in Donald's office two days after the podcast came out Oh, all we knew is that that Donald Trump had called them to the mat But remember we said on that podcast that what'll happen next is lipoo will meet with Donald Trump and when they come out of that room You'll know whether they cut a deal or struck a war if they cut a deal What you'll see is lipoo stays in place and Trump says really nice things about him go listen to the podcast and that's exactly the way it played out.

1:14:04And what was the call option priced at when we had that conversation? The short term ones are up 100x from that day. Oh my God. I texted to you. Yeah, I know the apple bot. It was like three cents to call the call option and jumped up to three bucks. That would have been that would have been the investment for sure. I'm gonna every after every one of these podcasts, I'm gonna call you Dave and say, okay, what's the what's the investment today? You know, this actually was done a little bit by Obama when the 2008 financial crisis hit. The US government gave a huge chunk of money to the car industry to save the car industry.

1:14:43And they got paid back in space because it turned into kind of an investment and then they we, so this is very similar to that. Yeah. This is a really big, big, big deal for Intel too. We met with Greg Lavender, the CTO, back before Gelsinger got fired. And he said, you know, that chip -sacked money has so much crap attached to it, so much baggage. Because the way these things go through Congress, they add garbage to the point where it's useless. And so they received, you know, $10 billion of unusable money. So it was of no value. So, you know, Trump being the business guy has restructured that into an equity investment.

1:15:17Now they can just use the money. So you'll see some serious motion coming out of that money now. At the same time, we're seeing a massa -san from Softbank signing a $2 billion investment deal and of course, SoftBank also owns 90 % of ARM whose chips powered 99 % of smartphones and it's really smart following what Mosa is doing here, getting into the chip industry. I don't want to spend more time on this, but we need native chip capacity. We're seeing Samsung investing in chip plants here Intel, we're seeing our friends from Taiwan coming to the US. A lot's moving here. The other point here is that the Intel is too big to fail, too strategic to fail.

1:16:07For sure. I mean, that would have been the obvious conversation as Intel's price. I mean, the question was whether Intel was going to be broken up and sold to other US companies. Anyways, here from Bloomberg, Apple expands iPhone production in India for US -bound phones. So all iPhone 17 models are being built in India, not China. And they're being built by Foxconn. So Foxconn that built all of this in China literally took over the Chinese economy as moved it now to India. They're going to be shipping this next month. That's a big deal. I'm actually getting on a plane to India right now. So, I'm going to go check.

1:16:51I'm going to check the plane. Don't have to go to India. Get your iPhone. They ship it to you. I want to make sure the production quality is high because in India, quality is a bit of a question sometimes. Oh my God. All right. I just, it's interesting, right? So much pressure to get out of China right now. Wait, wait. Let me just, right? You're making one point quick point about that. This is a very very big deal because one of the problems that India's always had is this perception that you can build high quality things there. And this will shatter that perception. I think a floodgate of manufacturing will start to move to India.

1:17:31One of our closing stories on AI and we're going to be going into robotics soon. And by the way, I just mentioned that we're going to be leaning more into crypto. So crypto and tokenized economies are going to be so important, especially as they connect to AI. So for those of you who would love to have you tell us who do you want us to interview on the crypto space, we're going to be talking about crypto and AI because it's going to just be, it's going to drive the future especially with agents being able to trade and manipulate currencies, not manipulate currencies. That's probably not the right thing to say.

1:18:05That's the AI part. All right, let's jump into this article here from CNBC. Albania wants to replace its corrupt government with AI. So Prime Minister Edirama has advocated for AI ministers and Prime Ministers. It's a big deal. We've seen a little bit of this in the UAE and a few other governments, but this would be a fascinating move. Selim comments? Yeah, I think so I met Eddie Rama a couple of years ago Well part of the circle of kind of heads of state that revolve around our EXO world and he did an incredible job turning on Turana the main city as mayor and then went to the thing and then he found that the the government is corrupt enough But you need to do something and you can't get it out of it in an easy way and coming out of top down with their eyes are super smart thing to be able to do.

1:19:00I expect to see this across the board at the very least having AI's that are monitoring activities and ministers and so on that allow you to reduce corruption. In Colombia, for example, those are port being built and all the government folks bought all the land around the port and then sold it for like a hundred X just after that announcement. So you have at that time of institutional corruption, like Congress people, congressmen and women in the US can have insider trading. That's kind of incredible to me, but public allows that. And so this is the kind of thing where I can oversee some of this and start to make kind of hacking into that problem space, which is huge, because the corruption problem is multiple trillion on the global economy.

1:19:43All right. So Dave, to you here, MIT study reports 95 % of AI pilots are failing. Companies have spent 30 to 40 billion dollars in generative AI, get 95 % see no financial return. The adoption rate is high, 80 % are testing, but and 40 % deploy, but the impact has been low. Big firms are running pilots, but struggle to scale. So I'm going to get the next slide as well for a little more data, and then let's talk about it. So in this study, 95 % of the failure is a failure to deliver financial benefit. And the study goes on to say that it's principally because the companies don't understand how to use the AI tools properly.

1:20:27There's a learning gap. And companies that by existing AI solutions succeed two -thirds of the time and those that try and build it internally do not succeed, only a third of them do. We saw a huge stark market dive as investor fears. I sort of hit on this, oh my God, is the AI bubble real. And then interestingly enough, and I think this is one of the most important things, Selim Unite talk about the EXO world, is that startups achieve a much better return on investment regarding AI, because startups have fewer entrenched bureaucracies and business processes. They don't force AI into existing workflows.

1:21:09they are native in AI and they reinvent their business based on AI. I can't stress this enough. We're finding, you know, we've been working on CEOs for the last couple of years on this. It is imperative to structure yourself as an EXO, right? That's one. There are two failure modes that we see companies get into. Any EXO is an exponential organization. Yeah, so this is the model that we've been pushing, though, that is not shown. I mean, companies using this model are delivering 40 times a shareholder returns that companies things that aren't. I mean, it's just absurdly obvious. Once you see the model, there are two failure modes that we see.

1:21:43One is people jump into the water without looking with a rock star. We came across a medical CEO who had uploaded all the sensitive patient data into the chat GPT and now has a huge legal exposure because of that. So that's one bucket of challenges. And the second bigger one is the cultural resistance because you try and people inside the company if you don't kind of get the culture right, people are scared just going to take their jobs into some mass. So those are two big huge buckets that this is essentially pointing out here. Dave, you're living this world right now with all of the startup settle link ventures.

1:22:17Yeah, I'll tell you, don't read these reports. It's not worth the time. I gotta be careful what I say here a little bit because we all love MIT like no place on the planet. And the disconnect between the students and the faculty is like nothing I've ever seen. So I work with the students every single day, all the startups, and they're killing it. And back in 2020, we did this little research thing, and about 14 MIT alums all time out of 140 ,000 alums, had become self -made billionaires, 14 as of 2020. Now Greg Brockman at OpenAI, Alexander Wang just got acquired by Google, Mark Chen. I mean, they're everywhere.

1:22:57They're absolutely thriving in the world of AI creating. Alexander acquired by Meta, not Google, right? Oh, sorry, sorry, by Meta. Yeah, so actually you've got top guys at Meta, OpenAI, and Google coming out of MIT, and Griggs case dropping out of MIT. And they're just killing it out there. Meanwhile, the administration keeps cranking out these documents saying, slow down, chill out. What are you talking about? Well, what it really is is we didn't invent it. Demis Asabis got the Nobel Prize. Jeffrey Hennon got the Nobel Prize. It's, I wanted that Nobel Prize. This isn't really happening. It's something else.

1:23:35We need to, actually, the theme in all of these reports is there's still a missing component. Some self -reflective, self -thinking things still needs to be invented to make these truly AI. Well, I think part of this is we're still early and we see these board of directors, the chairman goes to CEO, listen, what's your AI strategy? You need to have an AI strategy. and the CEO or the CTO is basically just throwing money at this without properly thinking it through, and that's the impedance mismatch between an established large company that's doing everything the way they've always done it for 10 or 20 years, trying to force AI into the mix.

1:24:18And one of the last points on this chart here is companies are wasting AI potentially by focusing on marketing and sales versus cutting the cost of back end processes and operations. What are the juices? Yeah, so let me let me can I just go to say so. So there's only one path to navigate this for companies. The bigger the company the more this has to be followed, smaller companies as you mentioned Peter can adapt very well and and Dave you're exactly right. This is a boom that's just going to keep going. So don't slow down, don't let this affect you at all. For a big company, there's only one model that's going to work and this is what I've been advising when I talk to the big company CEOs that we talk to.

1:24:57Go create an edge organization, this replicating the functionality that you're trying to, whatever you're trying to do. Let's say he's building cars, create an edge organization that's completely AI native and start automating the use cases. And then you create new, you create a young entrepreneur, mindset with the youngest employees possible and let them lose their eye, copying the functionality of the big and now you're essentially doing A, B test and seeing who can do it better. And over time, you can move there, you can deprecate the mothership and little by little move all of this to and that becomes a new gravity center over time.

1:25:35Do not try and transform the mothership. Do not do that. organization, the organization on the edge, that CEO, that team, this is Lockheed Skunk Works equivalent, needs to report directly to the CEO. Don't put them underneath the other organization. Need to be independent, allowed to iterate and do stupid things. This is where, you know, Kodak goes bankrupt even though they invented the digital camera. Yeah. And just to plug in also, just to wonder, we have solved this problem, folks. So anybody struggling with this just call us, there's a 10 week engagement that we run. In a big company, the default answer, if you're trying to think disruptive is no.

1:26:15Everybody comes very French and they go, but possible, look, can't do it. Da, da, da, da, da. We have learned in 10 weeks how to switch that default answer to a yes. So that's all you need to do, but then you need to do the thing on the edge, because even if you switch to a yes, you can't get out of the old models quickly enough. You have to do this thing at the edge and let the gravity center return drift to that. I'll get off my soapbox totally. The other thing, get your corporate venture fund back up and running. A lot of them like Intel Ventures got shut down just trying to save money. Here's all that prior slide.

1:26:49Google owns 14 % of Anthropics. That's a $14 billion position by itself. Get that corporate venture fund up and running again and then be a development partner for some of these startups. Try and be their first or second customer. Be super supportive of them and invest in them at the same time. And so then that group that you've invested in plugs into your internal edge group that's the link just described. And that's how AI knowledge is going to actually get into your organization because the reason these corporate things are failing is not because the AI is failing is because you're just throwing it into a group of people that have no idea even how to start using it and they kind of don't want it to take their job away.

1:27:25So they have a huge incentive to try to make it work. So our next subject here, open evidence gets perfect score on the US medical licensing exam. This is huge, right? So we've seen the data before, a human diagnostician gets 72 % a human plus GPT -4 was getting like 74 % and GPT -4 on its own was getting 92 % accuracy in diagnostics. Here we see another version of this that in the US medical licensing exam, again, this is to become a full doctor, right? You've done your internship in residencies. Open evidence is 100 % GPT -5 at 97%. Again, this is AI taking the lead pretty extraordinary. I love the fact that 40 % of doctors in the US are already using this.

1:28:20That's very inspiring to me. Yeah, listen, every doctor is going to be using this or they're not going to be a practicing physician. But here's the real topic going to hit on. Sal Maltman is getting into the BCI, the Brain Computer Interface race with a company called Merge Labs, who is targeting the combination of gene therapies and ultrasound as a mechanism to be able to read and write onto neurons. And I know the company well. I don't know what I can, I cannot say, but I'm hoping to have this company on stage with me at the abundance summit it in March. Also, Super Pump that Kevin Wheel, the Chief Product Officer, has agreed to come on our AIDA and be there and talk about how fast GPT -5 and when we'll have GPT -6 and what we'll have AGI.

1:29:14But check this out. There's probably my guest, Selim, 20 BCI companies, probably about four or five that I'm tracking that are extraordinarily effective and moving rapidly. Again, when Ray made his prediction of high bandwidth computer, you know, brain computer interface by 2033, I was like, Ray, you got this one wrong. And no, he got these guys this one right. We're going to see that. Extraordinary. Man, the man is incredibly annoying. Yeah, incredibly annoying. And Alex, you know, You know the team here and you know one of the co -founders as well, right? Yeah, no. My fellow Hertz fellow, Mikhail Shapiroz, a co -founder, I'm a huge fan of the company.

1:30:00My sense is this is such a rapidly moving space. I would love to see Merch Labs and all of its competitors deliver high band with BCIs in the next few years. I think if that window of the next few years for high band with BCIs isn't achieved, the risk is always that we achieve sort of a pure AI economy that completely D -Couples from the human economy and BCIs, I think, are our best hope if they can deliver quickly enough at keeping the human and machine economies. And you were on stage with me at Abundant Summit two years ago talking about the idea, the importance of coupling, right? So either we are on the AI team fully and we are literally coupled and this is the quote from Sam.

1:30:43Sam Alman says, the merge can take a lot of forms. we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot, but I think a merge is probably our best case scenario. We've seen this from Elon as well, the idea that being able to connect our Neo Cortex to the cloud and being able to ride on top of AI's acceleration versus being left in the dust, fascinating stuff. All right, let's, this is equally, and again, this is just showing that AI and science are going hand in hand. So OpenAI's GPT -4B, and I gave Kevin Wheel a hard time on his naming protocols for his models. I was super funny. Yeah.

1:31:31OpenAI GPT -4B designs proteins to reprogram cells, S -Dem cells. So you've heard me talk about the Yamannaka factors. This is a Nobel Nobel Prize won by Professor Yamannaka in Japan, funded by Mark Benioff. And what we've seen here is GPT -4B being able to come up with a new version of these transcription factors that's 50 times more effective. I remember Alex, when you showed me this, you were like, okay, here comes longevity escape velocity. That's right. I want to get out my Ray Kurzweil is right hat for this one. This is what AI -driven longevity escape velocity, at least the early glimmers of it look like, a generalist model making seemingly a breakthrough discovery in longevity.

1:32:24And I would encourage everyone, if you haven't, if you use chat GPT and you haven't played in with the built -in molecular biology supporting biochemistry support in the form of RDKIT. I would encourage everyone to try for themselves with any recent level. Go build a law form. Go develop a new pharmaceutical. This is now table stakes. This is where Dennis Osabis has the opportunity to become the most important figure in human history because he is the Nobel Prize winning Dennis now. He's spending all of his time on the cell simulator and just solving all disease. But he's also planted within Google.

1:33:04He has access to immense amount of compute and academic freedom to work on it. And so with that in the Nobel Prize, he's in a position to change the world more than anybody. I can't wait to talk to him. But the rate of progress here is unbelievable and his insights will be... When people say, why are you so excited about longevity and health span extension, it's this. It's the impact of AI. It's nothing else that's gonna move the needle this fast. We saw it on my podcast with Dr. Davidson Claire, his using AI for creating these molecular equivalents of what was only possible with gene therapies before.

1:33:46We almost need a whole episode dedicated headed just to the intersection of AI and biotech and protein folding and Yamannaka factors, not just stuff. We'll get. Demis on this podcast. We'll have that conversation for sure. All right, let's close out with robotics here. Can't avoid the robot revolution. The robots are coming. This year at abundance 360 in March, my plan is to have at least four of these companies, maybe five. They're with their robots. so we can play with them, see them, meet the CEOs. All right, one of the key things that's going on out of China, we're seeing these robot clusters in the United States and principally in China.

1:34:32We've seen the first humanoid robot games in Beijing, think hip hop, soccer, boxing, and track. A quick look at the video.

1:34:44Here's a hip -hop portion, the opening here's a soccer portion, a little bit of boxing,

1:34:54and track.

1:35:00All right, in the track section, unitary, I had unitary last year at the abundance, since sets 1 ,500 meter world record, but it's still 91 % slower than a human. All right, quick look at the video here.

1:35:22But, you know, the real news here is what China is doing, right? Creating these games and creating these clusters around humanoid robots, they're iterating the cycle much faster. It's amazing. I think that's the key part, the fact that they're making a co -public competition. This feels to me like first robotics on steroids in a funny way. I will say make a prediction that these type of robot to robot games will fail just because we watch the Olympics for the human factor, not for the speed of how somebody ran. So that's my prediction. Yeah, that's probably a good prediction. The higher level topic is really important, though benchmarks are critical for inspiring people to keep moving forward.

1:36:11And this is a form of benchmark. Yeah, you're right, it'll come and go, but there'll be some other benchmark. And as long as you're inspiring people to show off what they can do and compete, then this thing is gonna drive forward very quicker. Yeah, all right.

1:36:28I remember seeing this, member Scott Hassan's company on robotics, Selim. Yeah, they spent forever trying to get a robot to float laundry. Yeah, and here we go. And this is our friends at Figure AI. This is Figure 2. And this is fully automated. This is not tele -operations, which is a really important point to make. And here we see a folding laundry. I still think there's a human being in there. Well, they said it's not. But oh, you mean inside the robot, okay? Okay, and I found this fascinating as well. This is figures Heelix. And again, here we see a robot company. In fact, every robot company we've seen that had been partnered with a frontier model firm has started building their own AI models.

1:37:19Figure is no exception. Brett Adcock said we're building Heelix, which is their sort of AI for navigating the physical universe. And here we see figure two walking through a very rough terrain in a very human -like fashion. I mean, this is pretty extraordinary.

1:37:42You know, so you remember when we were talking to Bern Borneck a couple of weeks ago, at Onex Robotics, that we said, how do you debug whether it's physical or mental that's not working when it has a mistake? And he said, well, we have a teleoperator trying to do it, you know, with their hands or with their own feet. And that tells us if the robot can do it or not. And then if the robot could do it, then we know it's in the brain. If the robot can't do it, then we know it's in the robotics and the gears. But you can see in that in those videos that that's reaching the end of its life cycle. Because you know, when it's folding laundry, there's no tele operator that can be moving the the hands remotely at that speed and dexterity.

1:38:19So we imagine that we interviewed him. Yeah, go ahead Dave, sorry. No, he mentioned that when we interviewed him that he was right at the edge now of where that mode of debugging was going to continue to work. The robots are getting ahead of anything a remote control operator can do. And what we just saw in the video there for those you listening is a figure two walking along this junk yard of wood, of planks of, you know, and just almost tripping but catching itself and walking elegantly across, which was pretty amazing. It's been remembered for some time that Apple would get into the robotic business.

1:38:59They went almost into the electric car and autonomous car business. What we're seeing here is Apple is expanding a new set of AI -enabled devices, including a tabletop robot. This is sort of an iPad on a stick and I can look around. They're going to go into smart speakers, AI enhanced, human security cameras. Hopefully, some type of version of Siri that can spell my name correctly. I don't know. And the thing that frustrates me the most about Apple is I'm texting two people. Their names are obviously there in the text line and they spell both names wrong. Just drives me nuts. It drives me nuts.

1:39:42I was going to close on this article out of China and China is developing the first humanoid robot with an artificial womb. This is kawa technologies of creating robots and karyafetus in a synthetic womb with fluids and nutrients, the cost of 14k. Maybe this is part of Elon's prediction of AI and technology reversing the decline in birth rate. If you don't need to carry your own child anymore, but seriously, there's surrogate pregnancy. You see, one of the things that's interesting, and I'll have Ben Lamb on stage at the Abundance Summit, Ben is the CEO of Colossal. It's the company that's de -extinguishing the Wollimammoth, Direwolves, many other dodoes.

1:40:28In order for him to actually hit his marks, he needs to build artificial wounds. But they're not going to be carried around by a robot. They'll be stationary. They'll be physically in a room carefully guarded. Selim? I don't understand this carrying around bit. I mean, you know, this reminded you of Brad Templeton saying you have all these robot Horses and people are spending a huge amounts money on creating robot Horses giving a male horse and a female horse and I'll grow you a horse. Oh my God. I don't know, but I am going to read this final closing line and we'll maybe we'll we'll comment and break on this.

1:41:08This is from a guy named Dr. Singularity. I love the quote. He says, in the 1960s, Star Trek envisioned a distant utopia of placing warp drives, replicators, advanced societies, centuries away, even though even through the 80s and 2000s, the future was imaged as a slow linear march of progress. But reality no longer moves linearly. We're extremely close to having AI agents, researchers, matching the brightest human minds. soon we'll see millions or billions of them. A Star Trek world won't wait for the 2 ,200s. It would arrive by the 2030s. Amazing prediction. I think it's a great way of closing out this episode.

1:41:51It's exactly where we are right now. Yeah, and I would just, you know, I would add Star Trek is such a strange future in the Star Trek universe. It's energy rich. They have warp drives. They're traveling around the galaxy. It's biotech poor. So longevity was outlawed in the late 1990s in the Star Trek universe. And it's AI poor. Everyone surprised when a new AI pops out of human level or superhuman AI pops out of the holodeck. Whereas I think the future and the present, frankly, that we're finding ourselves in is going to be rich and abundant in all three. Amazing. Dave, great points. Well, after we did that Kevin Wheel interview, I started reading the futures faster than you think again.

1:42:31It's on my bookshelf when I read it again, but Peter, that book has so many things in it that are coming true right now. It's unbelievably prescient. And so I think it's worth everyone grabbing a copy and looking through it. It's actually much more relevant today than even when you wrote it because there's so many new converging technologies. So you have some examples in the book of technologies from, I guess that was 10 years ago. Was it that one? I go. No, it was 90 at 2019. Yeah. Yeah. So six years ago. But but so many things have happened since then. Infinity. You know, it's we're living in dog ears here.

1:43:11It's compressed time. But there's so many things that that book predicts. It's worth worth reading. Selim, what are you doing in India, buddy? I'm going for a bunch of conversations. The I've seen you already, some it is happening there, and they've asked me to do the opening. So I'm back in country of birth, doing running around having a bunch of meetings. I'm in like six cities in five days. It's gonna be pretty ugly for my carpentry. This is gonna be pretty ugly. But I mean, India's, there's just a piece of my soul that's always there, so. Love it, love it. Alex, what's the next week look like for you, buddy?

1:43:49Oh, my goodness. Well, given this flood of AI innovations, just immersing myself in it wherever possible, I advise a number of startups on how best to incorporate AI advances into their work streams. But really, I think smoothing out the singularity is the name of the game at this point. Fantastic. And Dave, anything, are you ending up the summer in any place in particular? Yeah, same as Alex. I have two weeks to grind through AI models and finish some things and then we're back at Stanford for the We were at Google on September 8th and then in video that night and then Stanford all day on the next day You know 2000 people the Blitzy launch will be then we'll do the Blitzy podcast right before that and then it'll I think We'll release it that same moment and then 60 back -to -back startups presenting on Stanford's campus So I got a little respite to finish a whole bunch of AI work before all hell breaks lose the first week of September.

1:44:49All right. Well, wishing you guys an amazing end of summer here. What a great time to be a liver, but I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We work to give you, hopefully, an increased IQ bump excitement about the future. I give you a positive vision of where things are going. So if you enjoy this, please let us know. We love your feedback. Tell your friends. Next episode more crypto because it's a ton happening there as well. Yeah, I know we are. We'll be diving more into crypto for sure. So if you're a crypto fan, let us know who you want us to be bringing on the podcast for the conversations. We're grateful for you.

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1:46:34Alright, now back to this episode.